The long-term habituation of sexual arousal in human males: A crossover design

Plaud, Joseph J.; Gaither, George A.; Henderson, Susan Amato; Devitt, Mary K.

doi:10.1007/bf03395233

Cited by 20 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…Long‐term habituation was indicated by decreases in the number of trials required to induce habituation and in the decreasing magnitude of spontaneous recovery across sessions. Long‐term habituation was further assessed in another group of men in semi‐weekly sessions for three consecutive weeks [31]. As with other studies [24–29], penile responses to the repeated audio stories decreased both intra‐sessionally and inter‐sessionally.…”

Section: Habituation Studies Conducted With Menmentioning

confidence: 78%

Habituation of Sexual Responses in Men and Women: A Test of the Preparation Hypothesis of Women's Genital Responses

Dawson

Suschinsky

Lalumière

2013

The Journal of Sexual Medicine

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Introduction Laboratory studies have revealed two well-replicated sex differences in sexual arousal patterns: category specificity and sexual concordance. Men's genital responses are dependent on specific sexual cues and are concordant with subjective reports of arousal. Women's genital responses are much less dependent on specific sexual cues and are much less concordant with their subjective reports. The preparation hypothesis provides a functional explanation for these sex differences and posits that women's genital responses are not tied to sexual preferences but rather occur automatically in the presence of any sexual cue to protect the genital tissues from injuries incurred through sexual activity. This hypothesis leads to the expectation that women's genital responses may not habituate as quickly or as completely as men's. Aim To determine whether there is a sex difference in the habituation of genital responses and to further test the preparation hypothesis of women's genital responses. Methods Twenty men and 20 women had their genital responses measured while they were exposed to nine consecutive presentations of the same erotic film clip (habituation), followed by two presentations of different erotic film clips (novelty), and followed by two presentations of the original erotic film clip (dishabituation). Main Outcome Measures Genital responses were measured continuously using penile strain gauges (assessing penile circumference) and vaginal probes (assessing vaginal pulse amplitude). Participants reported subjective sexual arousal, perceived genital arousal, and attention after each film clip presentation. Results Men and women displayed very similar patterns of genital responses, consistent with habituation and novelty effects. Effects of habituation and novelty were eliminated once subjective reports of attention were covaried. Conclusion Contrary to the prediction from the preparation hypothesis of women's genital responses, men's and women's responses showed similar patterns of habituation upon repeated exposure. Future research should attempt to maintain participants' attention in order to further test the preparation hypothesis.

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Section: Habituation Studies Conducted With Menmentioning

confidence: 78%

Habituation of Sexual Responses in Men and Women: A Test of the Preparation Hypothesis of Women's Genital Responses

Dawson

Suschinsky

Lalumière

2013

The Journal of Sexual Medicine

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“…Results showed a reduction in arousal within the session if the same stimulus was presented repeatedly, as well as a general reduction in arousal across days for the same stimulus. Presenting a variety of sexual stimuli maintained responding both within and across sessions (Plaud et al, 1997). …”

Section: Habituation Paradigmsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Habituation as a determinant of human food intake.

Epstein

Temple

Roemmich

et al. 2009

Psychological Review

194

203

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Research has shown that animals and humans habituate on a variety of behavioral and physiological responses to repeated presentations of food cues, and habituation is related to amount of food consumed and cessation of eating. The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of experimental paradigms used to study habituation, integrate a theoretical approach to habituation to food based on memory and associative conditioning models, and review research on factors that influence habituation. Individual differences in habituation as they related to obesity and eating disorders are reviewed, along with research on how individual differences in memory can influence habituation. Other associative conditioning approaches to ingestive behavior are reviewed, as well as how habituation provides novel approaches to preventing or treating obesity. Finally, new directions for habituation research are presented. Habituation provides a novel theoretical framework from which to understand factors that regulate ingestive behavior. KeywordsHabituation; food intake; ingestive behavior; Eating behavior; obesity; sensory specific satiety; energy intake Habituation as a determinant of human food intakeEating involves the repeated presentation of visual, olfactory and gustatory cues as a meal or snack is consumed. One effect of repeated stimulus presentations is habituation to those stimuli. Habituation represents a general model of how repeated stimulus presentations influence responding and is ubiquitous across response systems (Groves & Thompson, 1970). Habituation describes reductions in both physiological and behavioral responses to eating that occur as an eating episode progresses, and may provide a model to understand factors that are important for the cessation of eating, or satiation, within a meal. After the response rate to food has decreased, presentation of a new stimulus will result in recovery of responding to the new stimulus as well as recovery of responding, or dishabituation, to the habituated food stimulus (Epstein, Rodefer, Wisniewski, & Caggiula, 1992). The recovery of appetite or the motivation to eat is apparent to anyone who has consumed a large meal, and is quite full, and does not NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript require additional energy or nutrients to meet their daily needs, but decides to consume additional calories after seeing the dessert cart.It is common to consider the influence of sensory characteristics of food as being important guides to what foods to eat, and important determinants of the pleasure derived from eating (Bartoshuk, 1991;Cabanac, 1990), but habituation goes beyond this to explain factors that are important in regulating the amount of food consumed (Swithers, 1996). Habituation studies provide a framework to understand how sensory stimuli influence not only choice of food, but the amount of food consumed. One purpose of this paper is to present different experimental paradigms for studying habituation, along with consideration...

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“…Moreover, short-term habituation is faster for weaker stimuli, which we did not see here. However, it is not long-term habituation either, which also occurs in a relatively short time span (a few sessions, although it depends on the experiment and the subject species) before any plateau in the response (Packer and Siddle, 1987;Ornitz and Guthrie, 1989;Plaud et al, 1997). Here one might rather talk about a very long-term habituation, occurring because animals are presented with the same stimulus in all trials of all sessions.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Behavior Stability and Individual Differences in Pavlovian Extended Conditioning

2020

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How stable and general is behavior once maximum learning is reached? To answer this question and understand post-acquisition behavior and its related individual differences, we propose a psychological principle that naturally extends associative models of Pavlovian conditioning to a dynamical oscillatory model where subjects have a greater memory capacity than usually postulated, but with greater forecast uncertainty. This results in a greater resistance to learning in the first few sessions followed by an over-optimal response peak and a sequence of progressively damped response oscillations. We detected the first peak and trough of the new learning curve in our data, but their dispersion was too large to also check the presence of oscillations with smaller amplitude. We ran an unusually long experiment with 32 rats over 3,960 trials, where we excluded habituation and other well-known phenomena as sources of variability in the subjects' performance. Using the data of this and another Pavlovian experiment by Harris et al. (2015), as an illustration of the principle we tested the theory against the basic associative single-cue Rescorla-Wagner (RW) model. We found evidence that the RW model is the best non-linear regression to data only for a minority of the subjects, while its dynamical extension can explain the almost totality of data with strong to very strong evidence. Finally, an analysis of short-scale fluctuations of individual responses showed that they are described by random white noise, in contrast with the colored-noise findings in human performance.

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The long-term habituation of sexual arousal in human males: A crossover design

Cited by 20 publications

References 9 publications

Habituation of Sexual Responses in Men and Women: A Test of the Preparation Hypothesis of Women's Genital Responses

Habituation of Sexual Responses in Men and Women: A Test of the Preparation Hypothesis of Women's Genital Responses

Habituation as a determinant of human food intake.

Behavior Stability and Individual Differences in Pavlovian Extended Conditioning

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