CM Meston

F Toates

Frederick Toates

J Spape

ML Chivers

V Sennwald

Y Jiang

Crossref

COMMENTARYAHierarchical Model Might Cast Some Light on the AnomalyFrederick Toates1Received: 17 January 2017 / Accepted: 4 February 2017 / Published online: 21 February 2017 The Author(s) 2017. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.comIntroductionI propose that three questions can give insight, as follows:How do the systems underlying genital reactions described inthe target article (Chivers, 2017) work normally in the contextof social interaction with real-life sexual incentives? Whathave they been‘‘designed’’to achieve in evolutionary terms?How do artificial stimuli that are a product of a technologi-cally-advanced culture relate to the real sexual stimuli mostlikely to have been present in our very different early evolution?The Basics of Hierarchical ControlToates (2014) proposed a model of the hierarchical control ofsexual behavior. It assimilates the theorizing behind the infor-mationprocessingmodel (see targetarticle).Drawingwithbroadbrush-strokes, there are at least two different types of processunderlying the control of behavior. A low-level system, termedSystem1,is triggeredbystimuluspropertiesperse. It isengagedwhen, by evolutionary endowment or learning, ormost likely acombination of these, there is a straightforward (‘‘automatic’’)matching between the stimulus and an adaptive reaction. Thereaction can be (1) a localized bodily response, (2) an emotionor(3)amotivationalsignal,oranycombinationof these.Ahigher-level of control, System 2, is recruited where there is no suchstraightforward matching between events at the sense organsandadaptiveaction.Somerelativelycomplexandnovelcognitiveprocessing, rapid or not, is required to find a solution. In manysituations, it is likelythatboth layersofcontrolaresimultaneouslyengaged, the relative weight between them varying according tostimulusevents.Alsohigh-levelmotivationalandcognitivefactorscan modulate the strength of reaction determined by System 1.Evidence from Observing Sex Differences in Desireand BehaviorI suggest that control is weighted towards System 1 for men andtowards System 2 for women, though probably both systems areimplicated most of the time for both sexes. Although both sexesgivea rangeof reasons forhavingsex, these tend tobemorecon-centratedaroundsimple lust inmen(Meston&Buss,2007).Maledesire is triggered more strongly by the raw physical characteris-ticsofanotherindividualthanitisinwomen(Toates,inpress).Gen-ital signals could add to any signal arising from another individual.In women, there is a greater representation of reasons suchas wishing to feel attractive or experience companionship.Women, more than men, tend to place raw physical charac-teristics into a context of associations. This involves extrap-olation beyond sensory input.Evolutionary psychologists explain the average differencebetweenmenandwomeninfunctionalandevolutionary terms.Thus, female sexual desire tends to be more cautious and lesspromiscuous than is male desire. Evolutionary psychologistsdescribe a process of assessment of mate value. For the maleassessor, this is weighted towards female physical character-istics, presumably things that are rapidly assessed. For thefemale, assessment gives greater weight to, for example, themale’s empathy and resource-holding potential, things that takelonger to assess. I suggest next that the difference in process justdescribed ismanifest in thephenomena investigatedbyChivers.& Frederick ToatesF.Toates@Open.ac.uk1 Department of Life, Health and Chemical Sciences, OpenUniversity, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, UK123Arch Sex Behav (2017) 46:1203–1205DOI 10.1007/s10508-017-0956-yThe Genital ResponseMenFor men, the necessary and adequate stimulus is mainly theraw features of an attractive other, rapidly assessed in termsof such things as youth and waist-to-hip ratio. The reactioncomes under the control of System 1. Consider the image of anon-desired individual, for a heterosexual male, that of anothermale and, for a homosexual male, that of a female. These wouldfail to match the template and thereby not yield an assessment ofa sexually relevant stimulus. Similarly, as Chivers and Bailey(2005) demonstrated, bonobos fail this test for most men!Women (General Principles)A broader array of features is adequate to trigger a genitalresponse in women, i.e., degrees of‘‘gender non-specificity’’.Images of copulating bonobos are sufficient (Chivers & Bailey,2005), presumably via rapid revival of human sexual memoriesandmeanings.However,withtheexceptionofpre-potentstimuli,wemightmakesenseofnon-specificity, ifweassumetwothings:1. The perception of sexual features exerts a lower role intriggering the female genital response, as compared to thatof the male.2. Relative to the male, the female genital arousal reflects therapid extraction of at least a minimal level of meaning interms of sexual and possibly other forms of interaction(e.g., attachment).Androphilic WomenFor an androphilic woman, a male image might trigger somereactionbyvirtueofitsphysicalproperties.However,animageofasexually-responsiveorsexually-interactingfemalecanpre-sumably be just as relevant and suggestive (or even more so) ofthe participant’s own potential sexual interaction, i.e., relativenon-specificity.Gynephilic WomenI suggest that, for thestronglygynephilicwoman,onlyan imageof a female (clothed or naked, solitary or social) is directlyrelevant to her sexuality, either as a potential partner or as areminder of her own sexuality. The reaction of a gynephilicwoman to the male image might vary from attraction, throughindifference to fear/disgust, depending upon such things as thenature of any earlier heterosexual contact. Aversive associa-tions with men would be expected to amplify specificity. Non-female imagery might only arouse by extraction and extrapo-lation of a general meaning of the kind ‘‘sexual interaction’’.Indeed, unlike androphilic women, there is some gender speci-ficity in the genital response of gynephilic women, though notas strongly so as for men (Chivers, Seto, & Blanchard, 2007).Prepared and Non-prepared ReactionsFor both sexes, there exists gender specificity in response todecontextualized images of aroused genitals. The explana-tion might lie in the expression of the Chivers’ team that a‘‘pre-potent’’imageofanerectpenisissuggestivethatpenetrationis imminent (Spape, Timmers, Yoon, Ponseti, & Chivers, 2014).By means of evolution, women might be prepared to form anautomatic genital reaction to such a stimulus (System 1 control),where all the necessary information to trigger a response iscontained within the image.By comparison, we are prepared to show a fear reaction tothe sight of a snake, presumably all the more intense the closerup and decontextualized it is. By contrast, the sexually-inter-activestimuliusedby, forexample,Chivers,Rieger,Latty, andBailey (2004) in theiroriginal study, simulate theexperimentalparticipant as merely a voyeur of other’s sexual activity. Suchvoyeurism might not have formed part of our early evolutionand thus could trigger no automatically prepared response butrather a rapid search for understanding and a personalizedinterpretation.Consider the very high evolutionary cost/benefit ratio ofcopulation for women,ascompared to that formen.Thismightbe reflected in some ambivalence regarding male stimuli, i.e.,inhibition as well as excitation. Logically, the degree of inhi-bition might be expected to increase along the dimension ofgynephilia, which would fit Chivers’ result. By contrast, femalestimuli,assexualexcitationorat leastasremindersofawoman’sown sexuality, might create no such ambivalence. This leads usto a paradoxical situation but which might make evolutionarysense. The more distant the male stimulus, as in the case ofvoyeuristic sex, the greater the chance for cautious assessmentand, accompanying any excitatory input to the genitals, a tem-porary inhibition on genital responding. The unambiguous erectpenis close up might lower such inhibition.AttentionAttention is organized hierarchically, something implicit inChivers’ target article. A process of automatic attention is cap-tured by erotic images (Sennwald et al., 2015). Erotic images ofsingle individuals capture attention even at an unconscious levelwhen their content matches the participant’s sexual orientation(Jiang, Costello, Fang, Huang, & He 2006). This is organizedsubcortically, apparently in a very similar way to which atten-tion is directed to fear-related stimuli such as snakes. There isalso a process of controlled attention, by which a person can1204 Arch Sex Behav (2017) 46:1203–1205123voluntarily direct attention (‘‘top-down’’) to erotic stimuli orchoose not to do so.Incentive MotivationThe process of incentive motivation, involving the ventralstriatum, is also triggered by erotic images. Evidence sug-gests that, unlike the genital response, activity here reflectsnot just sexual relevance but the targeted motivational valueof the images to the viewer in preparation for action, i.e.,bodily movement in space (Ponseti et al., 2006). The implicitassumption is that activity corresponds to the appetitive valueof the imagery.The term‘‘incentive salience’’ refers to the power of anincentive stimulus to act as a ‘‘magnet’’ for attention and moti-vated action. Such a process could be involved in the automaticallocation of attention, just described. Evidence suggests that agiven incentive can owe its salience value to more than onesimultaneously-existingmotivational state (Toates, 2014).Forexample, for one individual, another might form an attractiveincentive because of simultaneous sexual, platonically socialand/or romantic motivations, or a combination of sexual anddominance/aggressive motivations (reviewed in Toates, 2014).Evidencepoints todopamineasbeing thecommondenominatorin all these forms of incentive effects.Subjective Arousal and DesireIn men, subjective arousal is driven largely by sensory fea-tures of the image. There is a relatively high concordancebetween the genital response to erotic imagery and subjectivearousal. In each case, the response is largely dependent uponextracting the physical features of the target individual evenfrom a social context.In women, subjective arousal depends more strongly uponmeanings attached to the raw stimulus input in addition to thegenital reaction. Meanings offer a range of idiosyncratic pos-sibilities and can clearly fluctuate widely with social context.Hence, there is usually a much lower concordance of femalesubjective arousal and genital reaction.On being asked about her subjective desire and answering‘‘androphilic,’’a woman would have a frame of reference: herpartner, ex-partners or wished-for partners. Such controlled expo-sure to a desired and known target in the imagination is rather dif-ferentfromsuddenlybeingexposedtotheimageofanudestranger.I would suggest yet another dissociation. Suppose that thesepassive participants were to be invited to engage sexually withthe stranger models displaying before them. My strong hunchis that many more males than females would opt to participate.In other words, for women, even a reported subjective arousalthat is nearly equivalent for a stranger as for a regular partner(as found by Chivers) would not translate into correspondinggoal-directed activity. Presumably, inhibition would be exer-ted within System 2.Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the CreativeCommons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and repro-duction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the originalauthor(s) and thesource,providea link to theCreativeCommons license,andindicate if changes were made.ReferencesChivers, M. L. (2017). The specificity of women’s sexual response and itsrelationship with sexual orientations: A review and ten hypotheses.Archives of Sexual Behavior. doi:10.1007/s10508-016-0897-x.Chivers, M. L., & Bailey, J. M. (2005). A sex difference in features thatelicit genital response. Biological Psychology, 70, 115–120.Chivers, M. L., Rieger, G., Latty, E., & Bailey, J. M. (2004). A sexdifference in the specificity of sexual arousal.Psychological Science,15, 736–744.Chivers, M. L., Seto, M. C., & Blanchard, R. (2007). Gender and sexualorientation differences in sexual response to sexual activitiesversus gender of actors in sexual films. Journal of Personality andSocial Psychology, 93, 1108–1121.Jiang, Y., Costello, P., Fang, F., Huang, M., & He, S. (2006). A gender-and sexual orientation-dependent spatial attentional effect of invis-ible images. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 103,17048–17052.Meston, C. M., & Buss, D. M. (2007). Why humans have sex.ArchivesofSexual Behavior, 36, 477–507.Ponseti, J., Bosinski, H. A., Wolff, S., Peller, M., Jansen, O., Mehdorn,H. M.… Siebner, H. R. (2006). A functional endophenotype forsexual orientation in humans. Neuroimage, 33, 825–833.Sennwald, V., Pool, E., Brosch, T., Delplanque, S., Bianchi-Demicheli,F., & Sander, D. (2015). Emotional attention for erotic stimuli:Cognitive and brain mechanisms. Journal of Comparative Neu-rology, 524, 1668–1675.Spape, J., Timmers, A. D., Yoon, S., Ponseti, J., & Chivers, M. L. (2014).Gender-specific genital and subjective sexual arousal to prepotentsexual features in heterosexual women and men.Biological Psychol-ogy, 102, 1–9.Toates, F. (2014). How sexual desire works: The enigmatic urge.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Toates, F. (in press). The enigmatic urge: How sexual desire works. In L.Workman, W. Reader, & J. H. Barkow (Eds.), Cambridge hand-book of evolutionary perspectives on human behavior. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.Arch Sex Behav (2017) 46:1203–1205 1205123

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A Hierarchical Model Might Cast Some Light on the Anomaly

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A Hierarchical Model Might Cast Some Light on the Anomaly

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