Enhanced Attentional Bias towards Sexually Explicit Cues in Individuals With and Without Compulsive Sexual Behaviours
AUTHOR(S)
PUBLISHED
2014 in PLoS ONE 9(8): e105476
KEY FINDINGS
- This study shows that compared to healthy volunteers, compulsive sexual behavior subjects have enhanced attentional bias to explicit cues but not neutral cues particularly for early stimuli latency...this provides support for an incentive motivation theory of addiction underlying the aberrant response towards sexual cues in compulsive sexual behavior.
ABSTRACT
Compulsive sexual behaviour (CSB) is relatively common and has been associated with significant distress and psychosocial impairments. CSB has been conceptualized as either an impulse control disorder or a non-substance ‘behavioural’ addiction. Substance use disorders are commonly associated with attentional biases to drug cues which are believed to reflect processes of incentive salience. Here we assess male CSB subjects compared to age-matched male healthy controls using a dot probe task to assess attentional bias... READ FULL ABSTRACT
EXCERPTS
- "Our current findings dovetail with our recent observation that CSB subjects have enhanced activity to sexually explicit cues in the ventral striatum, amygdala and dorsal anterior cingulate activity, the same network activated in drug cue reactivity in disorders of addiction. That this neural network correlates in CSB subjects with enhanced desire or wanting and not liking provides support for theories of incentive motivation being applicable to CSB."
