Mental Health
Appetitive conditioning with pornographic stimuli elicits stronger activation in reward regions than monetary and gaming-related stimuli.
Open Access: Yes.
Abstract
Appetitive conditioning plays an important role in the development and maintenance of pornography-use and gaming disorders. It is assumed that primary and secondary reinforcers are involved in these processes. Despite the common use of pornography and gaming in the general population appetitive conditioning processes in this context are still not well studied. This study aims to compare appetitive conditioning processes using primary (pornographic) and secondary (monetary and gaming-related) rewards as unconditioned stimuli (UCS) in the general population. Additionally, it investigates the conditioning processes with gaming-related stimuli as this type of UCS was not used in previous studies. Thirty-one subjects participated in a differential conditioning procedure in which four geometric symbols were paired with either pornographic, monetary, or gaming-related rewards or with nothing to become conditioned stimuli (CS + porn, CS + game, CS + money, and CS-) in an functional magnetic resonance imaging study. We observed elevated arousal and valence ratings as well as skin conductance responses for each CS+ condition compared to the CS-. On the neural level, we found activations during the presentation of the CS + porn in the bilateral nucleus accumbens, right medial orbitofrontal cortex, and the right ventral anterior cingulate cortex compared to the CS-, but no significant activations during CS + money and CS + game compared to the CS-. These results indicate that different processes emerge depending on whether primary and secondary rewards are presented separately or together in the same experimental paradigm. Additionally, monetary and gaming-related stimuli seem to have a lower appetitive value than pornographic rewards.
Relevance
“Overall, the results of the present study indicate that pornographic stimuli (primary rewards) enable appetitive affective learning processes and strong conditioning effects in human subjects.”
“In line with previous studies, [brain] activations were observed during the anticipation of a pornographic reward in bilateral NAcc, the right mOFC, and right vACC compared to the control condition. Additionally, we found higher activation during the anticipation of a pornographic reward compared to a monetary reward in bilateral NAcc and dACC and higher activation in left NAcc and insula as well as bilateral dACC and thalamus compared to the anticipation of gaming screenshots.”
Citation
Krikova, K., Klein, S., Kampa, M., Walter, B., Stark, R., & Klucken, T. (2024). Appetitive conditioning with pornographic stimuli elicits stronger activation in reward regions than monetary and gaming-related stimuli. Human brain mapping, 45(8), e26711. https://doi.org/10.1002/hbm.26711
