Online pornography and sex addiction
ACCORDING TO a study by researchers at the University of Cambridge, individuals afflicted with sex addiction are driven to seek out sexual images more than their peers without the addiction. In addition, they are more vulnerable to cues in their environment that are linked to sexual images than those linked to neutral images. The study was published late last year in the Journal
Twenty-two sex addicts and 40 healthy male volunteers were recruited by Dr. Valerie Voon, the lead author of the study, and her colleagues to study their behavior in two tasks. During the first task, these individuals were shown images, of naked women, clothed women and furniture, in pairs, and thereafter more image pairs, a mix of new and familiar images. They were then asked to choose an image that could win them £1. Unbeknown to them, the probability of winning for either images was 50%.
Sex addicts were more likely to pick out the novel choice over the familiar choice for sexual images relative to neutral object images. By contrast, their healthy counterparts had the tendency to choose the novel choice for neutral human female images relative to neutral object images. “We can all relate in some way to searching for novel stimuli online — it could be flitting from one news Web site to another, or jumping from Facebook to Amazon to YouTube and on,” Dr. Voon said. “For people who show compulsive sexual behavior, though, this becomes a pattern of behavior beyond their control, focused on pornographic images.”
Volunteers underwent a second task, in which they were shown pairs of images, of an undressed woman and a neutral gray box, overlaid on different abstract patterns, leading them to associate abstract images with the images of the woman and the box. As with the first task, they were asked to select between these abstract images and a new abstract image. Those with sex addiction were more likely to choose cues, in this case abstract patterns, associated with sexual and monetary rewards, supporting the notion that what seemed to be innocuous cues in their environment could trigger them to search for sexual images. “Cues can be as simple as just opening up their Internet browser,” Dr. Voon said. “They can trigger a chain of actions and before they know it, the addict is browsing through pornographic images. Breaking the link between these cues and the behavior can be extremely challenging.”
A further test was conducted by the researchers, which involved having 20 sex addicts and 20 healthy volunteers go through brain scans while being shown a series of repeated images, of an undressed woman, a £1 coin or a neutral gray box. Sex addicts were found to view the sexual image repeatedly, and experience a decline in brain activity in the region called dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, which is involved in anticipating rewards and responding to new events. This finding is consistent with the notion of habituation, where addicts find a stimulus getting less rewarding.
“Our findings are particularly relevant in the context of online pornography,” Dr. Voon said. “It’s not clear what triggers sex addiction in the first place and it is likely that some people are more pre-disposed to the addiction than others, but the seemingly endless supply of novel sexual images available online helps feed their addiction, making it more and more difficult to escape.”