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Global Public Health May 2021Pleasure is a key motivator for sex globally, while unsafe sex is the largest risk factor for young women's mortality and the second for young men. However, framing of... (Review)
Review
Pleasure is a key motivator for sex globally, while unsafe sex is the largest risk factor for young women's mortality and the second for young men. However, framing of sex education and sexual health programmes continues to be around avoiding danger, death and disease, rather than striving for pleasurable, satisfying, and safe sexual experiences. Omission of pleasure and sex-positivity goes against growing evidence that shows that people with more positive views of sexuality are more likely to practice safer sex, use contraception consistently, have higher sexual self-esteem and be more assertive.The Pleasure Project and Rutgers, with GH SRHR Alliance (Ghana) and SRHR Alliance (Kenya), conducted a qualitative pilot study of sexuality education under the Get Up Speak Out programme, analysing the extent to which they included sex-positive content, with recommendations to enhance sex-positivity. Data were collected through interviews with facilitators, focus group discussions with learners, observation of sessions, and curricula content analysis. Findings reveal possibilities of sex-positivity in restrictive contexts, illustrating ways for sexuality education to become more sex-positive and pleasure inclusive. This study enables the development of a new tool for a 'pleasure audit', with markers of high-quality, sex-positive and pleasure-inclusive sexuality education or sexual health programmes.
Topics: Female; Ghana; Humans; Kenya; Male; Pilot Projects; Pleasure; Sex Education; Sexual Behavior; Sexuality
PubMed: 32816645
DOI: 10.1080/17441692.2020.1809691 -
Neuron May 2024"Supporting human flourishing" is a goal of governments and societies, yet the construct may appear hard to define. We discuss the emerging science of pleasure and... (Review)
Review
"Supporting human flourishing" is a goal of governments and societies, yet the construct may appear hard to define. We discuss the emerging science of pleasure and flourishing, insights into the brain mechanisms of meaning making and thriving, and the potential for interdisciplinary studies to advance this promising scientific field.
Topics: Humans; Pleasure; Brain
PubMed: 38608705
DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2024.03.022 -
Proceedings of the National Academy of... Jun 2013Music has existed in human societies since prehistory, perhaps because it allows expression and regulation of emotion and evokes pleasure. In this review, we present... (Review)
Review
Music has existed in human societies since prehistory, perhaps because it allows expression and regulation of emotion and evokes pleasure. In this review, we present findings from cognitive neuroscience that bear on the question of how we get from perception of sound patterns to pleasurable responses. First, we identify some of the auditory cortical circuits that are responsible for encoding and storing tonal patterns and discuss evidence that cortical loops between auditory and frontal cortices are important for maintaining musical information in working memory and for the recognition of structural regularities in musical patterns, which then lead to expectancies. Second, we review evidence concerning the mesolimbic striatal system and its involvement in reward, motivation, and pleasure in other domains. Recent data indicate that this dopaminergic system mediates pleasure associated with music; specifically, reward value for music can be coded by activity levels in the nucleus accumbens, whose functional connectivity with auditory and frontal areas increases as a function of increasing musical reward. We propose that pleasure in music arises from interactions between cortical loops that enable predictions and expectancies to emerge from sound patterns and subcortical systems responsible for reward and valuation.
Topics: Auditory Cortex; Auditory Perception; Frontal Lobe; Humans; Music; Nerve Net; Nucleus Accumbens; Pleasure
PubMed: 23754373
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1301228110 -
European Neuropsychopharmacology : the... May 2014A range of emotional and motivation impairments have long been clinically documented in people with schizophrenia, and there has been a resurgence of interest in... (Review)
Review
A range of emotional and motivation impairments have long been clinically documented in people with schizophrenia, and there has been a resurgence of interest in understanding the psychological and neural mechanisms of the so-called "negative symptoms" in schizophrenia, given their lack of treatment responsiveness and their role in constraining function and life satisfaction in this illness. Negative symptoms comprise two domains, with the first covering diminished motivation and pleasure across a range of life domains and the second covering diminished verbal and non-verbal expression and communicative output. In this review, we focus on four aspects of the motivation/pleasure domain, providing a brief review of the behavioral and neural underpinnings of this domain. First, we cover liking or in-the-moment pleasure: immediate responses to pleasurable stimuli. Second, we cover anticipatory pleasure or wanting, which involves prediction of a forthcoming enjoyable outcome (reward) and feeling pleasure in anticipation of that outcome. Third, we address motivation, which comprises effort computation, which involves figuring out how much effort is needed to achieve a desired outcome, planning, and behavioral response. Finally, we cover the maintenance emotional states and behavioral responses. Throughout, we consider the behavioral manifestations and brain representations of these four aspects of motivation/pleasure deficits in schizophrenia. We conclude with directions for future research as well as implications for treatment.
Topics: Animals; Anticipation, Psychological; Brain; Executive Function; Humans; Models, Psychological; Motivation; Pleasure; Schizophrenia; Schizophrenic Psychology
PubMed: 24461724
DOI: 10.1016/j.euroneuro.2013.06.007 -
Journal of Orthopaedic Science :... Sep 2013
Topics: Biomedical Research; Pleasure
PubMed: 23943222
DOI: 10.1007/s00776-013-0440-z -
Annals of the New York Academy of... Nov 2016The pursuit of happiness is enshrined in the founding document of our nation as a fundamental and inalienable right. Yet nowhere is the method of this pursuit clearly... (Review)
Review
The pursuit of happiness is enshrined in the founding document of our nation as a fundamental and inalienable right. Yet nowhere is the method of this pursuit clearly defined. What, exactly, does it mean to be happy, and how can such happiness be sustained over the long term? Can happiness be accurately gauged or measured? How does the paradoxical relationship between happiness and pleasure shape our quest to lead the good life? And what does modern science have to tell us about this universal yet elusive pursuit? Steve Paulson, executive producer and host of To the Best of Our Knowledge, moderated a discussion that included attorney and author Kim Azzarelli, historian Darrin McMahon, and social psychologist Barry Schwartz, who joined forces to share their research and insight on happiness, pleasure, and the coveted good life.
Topics: Happiness; Humans; Interpersonal Relations; Pleasure; Problem Solving; Radio
PubMed: 27258656
DOI: 10.1111/nyas.13068 -
International Journal of Cardiology Feb 2016
Topics: Coitus; Electrocardiography; Female; Humans; Middle Aged; Pleasure; Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy
PubMed: 26666345
DOI: 10.1016/j.ijcard.2015.11.115 -
Emotion (Washington, D.C.) Feb 2022We investigated intentional thinking for pleasure, defined as the deliberate attempt to have pleasant thoughts while disengaged from the external world. We propose a...
We investigated intentional thinking for pleasure, defined as the deliberate attempt to have pleasant thoughts while disengaged from the external world. We propose a Trade-Off model that explains when and why thinking for pleasure is enjoyable: People focus on personally meaningful thoughts when thinking for pleasure (especially when prompted to do so), which increases their enjoyment, but they find it difficult to concentrate on their thoughts, which decreases their enjoyment. Thus, the net enjoyment of thinking for pleasure is a trade-off between its benefits (personal meaningfulness) and costs (difficulty concentrating). To test the model, we compared intentional thinking for pleasure to four alternate activities in three studies. Thinking for pleasure was more enjoyable than undirected thinking (Study 1) and planning (Study 3), because it was more meaningful than these activities while requiring a similar level of concentration. Thinking for pleasure was just as enjoyable as playing a video game (Study 2) or unprompted idle time activities (Study 3), but for different reasons: It was more meaningful than these activities, but required more concentration. We discuss the implications of these findings for what people might choose to do during idle times. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
Topics: Attention; Emotions; Humans; Pleasure; Video Games
PubMed: 34941322
DOI: 10.1037/emo0001029 -
PloS One 2022What is difficult is not usually pleasurable. Yet, for certain unfamiliar figurative language, like that which is common in poetry, while comprehension is often more...
What is difficult is not usually pleasurable. Yet, for certain unfamiliar figurative language, like that which is common in poetry, while comprehension is often more difficult than for more conventional language, it is in many cases more pleasurable. Concentrating our investigation on verb-based metaphors, we examined whether and to what degree the novel variations (in the form of verb changes and extensions) of conventional verb metaphors were both more difficult to comprehend and yet induced more pleasure. To test this relationship, we developed a set of 62 familiar metaphor stimuli, each with corresponding optimal and excessive verb variation and metaphor extension conditions, and normed these stimuli using both objective measures and participant subjective ratings. We then tested the pleasure-difficulty relationship with an online behavioral study. Based on Rachel Giora and her colleagues' 'optimal innovation hypothesis', we anticipated an inverse U-shaped relationship between ease and pleasure, with an optimal degree of difficulty, introduced by metaphor variations, producing the highest degree of pleasure when compared to familiar or excessive conditions. Results, however, revealed a more complex picture, with only metaphor extension conditions (not verb variation conditions) producing the anticipated pleasure effects. Individual differences in semantic cognition and verbal reasoning assessed using the Semantic Similarities Test, while clearly influential, further complicated the pleasure-difficulty relationship, suggesting an important avenue for further investigation.
Topics: Adult; Comprehension; Female; Humans; Male; Metaphor; Pleasure; Poetry as Topic; Reaction Time; Semantics
PubMed: 35148355
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0263781 -
Archives of Sexual Behavior Feb 2022
Topics: Humans; Pleasure
PubMed: 33037567
DOI: 10.1007/s10508-020-01841-5