Pavlovian conditioning of sexual interests in human males.

Learning effects on sperm competition and reproductive fitness.

Learning and other common psychological processes presumably evolved because they contribute to reproductive fitness, but reproductive outcomes are rarely measured in psychology experiments. We examined the effects of Pavlovian conditioning on reproductive fitness in a sperm-competition situation. Typically, two males mating with the same female in immediate succession sire similar numbers of o...

The Role of Pavlovian Conditioning in Sexual Behavior: A Comparative Analysis of Human and Nonhuman Animals

The misbehavior of value and the discipline of the will

Most reinforcement learning models of animal conditioning operate under the convenient, though fictive, assumption that Pavlovian conditioning concerns prediction learning whereas instrumental conditioning concerns action learning. However, it is only through Pavlovian responses that Pavlovian prediction learning is evident, and these responses can act against the instrumental interests of the ...

Theories of Sexual Offending

This article presented a theoretical model of sexually deviant interests that described how they may be learned through the same mechanisms by which conventional sexuality is learned . The model is divided into two parts : acquisition processes and maintenance processes . The authors noted that the model adopts the position that maladaptive behavior can result from quantitative and qualitative ...

The Role of Conditioning in Sexual Arousal

Conditioning models hold intuitive appeal for explaining the etiology of atypical sexual arousal. The majority of treatments for sexual disorders are based on such models (Plaud & Martini, 1999) and numerous case studies attest to the effectiveness of behavior or response modification techniques in dealing with paraphilias (Gaither, Rosenkranz & Plaud, 1998). It is also a common theoretical ass...