The role of incentive learning and cognitive regulation in sexual arousal

Abstract

Insight in the underlying mechanisms of sexual motivation is essential to understand disorders in sexual desire and such understanding may be helpful in the development of new and effective psychological and pharmacological interventions, since empirically validated treatments are lacking for female sexual interest/arousal disorder as well as hypersexuality and related disorders. Because much sexual behaviour is thought to be acquired through learning, and given the specific hypothesis that classical conditioning plays an etiological role in the development of sexual dysfunction, research in the area of classical conditioning of human sexual arousal is warranted. In the first part of this thesis, experimental studies on sexual conditioning and extinction are described. Further insights in human sexual motivation and behaviour require looking more closely at the pathway of information between stimulus and response and considering how these processes are embedded within other (higher-level) processes and higher order brain structures such as frontal regions, known to be involved in emotional processing and regulation. The second part of this thesis describes studies on the influence of emotion regulation strategies on the expectation of sexual reward, and one fMRI study on the influence of acute-stress on deliberate emotion regulation during the processing of sexual stimuli.