Link to original study – Conscious and Non-Conscious Measures of Emotion: Do They Vary with Frequency of Pornography Use? (2017)
Comments: This EEG study on porn users cited 3 Nicole Prause EEG studies. The authors believe that all 3 Prause EEG studies actually found desensitization or habituation in frequent porn users (which often occurs with addiction). This is exactly what YBOP has always claimed (explained in this critique: Critique of: Letter to the editor “Prause et al. (2015) the latest falsification of addiction predictions” 2016). Numerous other peer-reviewed papers agree that Prause et al., 2015 supports the porn addiction model: Peer-reviewed critiques of Prause et al., 2015
In the excerpts below these 3 citations indicate the following Nicole Prause EEG studies (#8 is Prause et al., 2015):
- 7 – Prause, N.; Steele, V.R.; Staley, C.; Sabatinelli, D. Late positive potential to explicit sexual images associated with the number of sexual intercourse partners. Soc. Cogn. Affect. Neurosc. 2015, 10, 93–100.
- 8 – Prause, N.; Steele, V.R.; Staley, C.; Sabatinelli, D.; Hajcak, G. Modulation of late positive potentials by sexual images in problem users and controls inconsistent with “porn addiction”. Biol. Psychol. 2015, 109, 192–199.
- 14 – Steele, V.R.; Staley, C.; Fong, T.; Prause, N. Sexual desire, not hypersexuality, is related to neurophysiological responses elicited by sexual images. Socioaffect. Neurosci. Psychol. 2013, 3, 20770
Excerpts describing Prause et al., 2015:
Event-related potentials (ERPs) have often been used as a physiological measure of reactions to emotional cues, e.g., [24]. Studies utilizing ERP data tend to focus on later ERP effects such as the P300 [14] and Late-Positive Potential (LPP) [7, 8] when investigating individuals who view pornography. These later aspects of the ERP waveform have been attributed to cognitive processes such as attention and working memory (P300) [25] as well as sustained processing of emotionally-relevant stimuli (LPP) [26]. Steele et al. [14] showed that the large P300 differences seen between viewing of sexually explicit images relative to neutral images was negatively related to measures of sexual desire, and had no effect on participants’ hypersexuality. The authors suggested that this negative finding was most probably due to the images shown not having any novel significance to the participant pool, as participants all reported viewing high volumes of pornographic material, consequently leading to the suppression of the P300 component. The authors went on to suggest that perhaps looking at the later occurring LPP may provide a more useful tool, as it has been shown to index motivation processes. Studies investigating the effect pornography use has on the LPP have shown the LPP amplitude to be generally smaller in participants who report having higher sexual desire and problems regulating their viewing of pornographic material [7, 8]. This result is unexpected, as numerous other addiction-related studies have shown that when presented with a cue-related emotion task, individuals who report having problems negotiating their addictions commonly exhibit larger LPP waveforms when presented images of their specific addiction-inducing substance [27]. Prause et al. [7, 8] offer suggestions as to why the use of pornography may result in smaller LPP effects by suggesting that it may be due to a habituation effect, as those participants in the study reporting overuse of pornographic material scored significantly higher in the amount of hours spent viewing pornographic material.
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Studies have consistently shown a physiological downregulation in processing of appetitive content due to habituation effects in individuals who frequently seek out pornographic material [3, 7, 8]. It is the authors’ contention that this effect may account for the results observed.
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Future studies may need to utilise a more up-to-date standardised image database to account for changing cultures. Also, maybe high porn users downregulated their sexual responses during the study. This explanation was at least used by [7, 8] to describe their results which showed a weaker approach motivation indexed by smaller LPP (late positive potential) amplitude to erotic images by individuals reporting uncontrollable pornography use. LPP amplitudes have been shown to decrease upon intentional downregulation [62, 63]. Therefore, an inhibited LPP to erotic images may account for lack of significant effects found in the present study across groups for the “erotic” condition.
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