A new study published in last week’s journal of Socioaffective Neuroscience and Psychology suggests that maybe it doesn’t—bad news for celebrities like Tiger Woods and Russell Brand who have made it trendy in recent years to claim a clinical addiction to sex as an explanation for sexual misbehavior. Now, for the first time, UCLA researchers have measured how the brain behaves in so-called hypersexual people who have problems regulating their viewing of sexual images. Instead, researchers found that hypersexual brains don’t react in the same way as other addicts’ brains—in fact, the neural responses to pornography only varied based on levels of sexual libido, rather than on measures of sexual compulsivity. People with higher libidos had more active brain reactions to the sexual images than people with lower libidos, but that was the only correlation. If the results of this first study can be replicated, it would represent a major challenge to the notion that sex and pornography can be literally addictive. But this data challenges the addiction model and forces us to reconsider how we think and talk about these problems.” 
 
 Advertisement 
 
 
 
 For the study, researchers recruited 52 people (39 men and 13 women) who reported having difficulties controlling their use of pornography and used electroencephalography (EEG) to measure their brain responses to various images. Some images were sexual in nature, such as kissing, nudity, and penetrative sex, while others were designed to be neutral or even unpleasant, such as pictures of skiers and dismembered bodies. Researchers analyzed brain response to the pictures in the first 300 milliseconds after the images appeared, commonly called a “P300.” Hundreds of neuroscience studies have relied on P300 measurements to analyze the brain’s response to various stimuli; for example, Prause said, several studies of substance addicts found increased P300 responses to images of their drugs of choice as compared to neutral images. If they indeed suffer from hypersexuality, or sexual addiction, their brain response to visual sexual stimuli could be expected be higher, in much the same way that the brains of cocaine addicts have been shown to react to images of the drug in other studies. Now this study has reignited the ongoing debate about whether sex and other so-called behavioral addictions—also known as process addictions, such as shopping and tanning—should be considered pathological alongside substance addictions such as nicotine, alcohol, and drugs. It failed to make the cut in the recently updated Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM-5, considered the bible for diagnosing mental disorders. Nevertheless, mental health professionals around the world have reported patients who come to them seeking help with sexually compulsive behavior. But the debate about sex addiction underlines important questions about how psychiatrists should categorize the difference between a clinical mental illness that can be demonstrated in a lab, such as substance addiction, and other forms of mental distress, which deserve equal care and compassion but don’t necessarily indicate a medical mental illness. Advertisement 
 
 
 
 “We don't have a lot of information about what constitutes normative sexual behavior, so how can we conclusively determine what is deviant?” said Dr. Rory Reid, a neuropsychologist at UCLA and the principal investigator for the DSM-5 field trial on hypersexual disorder. This new study is the first time that scientists have measured the active responses of hypersexual brains to sexual stimuli, which seems closer to the mark if scientists want to prove or dispel the clinical case for sex addiction.
– The term "sex addiction" might get tossed around a lot these days as a way to explain some not-so-classy behavior of the Anthony Weiner-Tiger Woods variety, but is it really an addiction on par with drugs or alcohol? The first study to explore brain responses in people who describe themselves as hypersexual suggests otherwise, reports UCLA. Researchers there showed the subjects—39 men and 13 women—sexual images, and discovered that their brains didn't respond in the same way that, say, a cocaine addict would respond to images of cocaine. “Most people describe high-frequency sexual problems as an ‘addiction’—that’s how the public and even many clinicians talk about it," one of the researchers tells Slate. "But this data challenges the addiction model and forces us to reconsider how we think and talk about these problems.” The subjects have higher libidos, or sexual desire, but not necessarily a clinical medical problem. They still need help, but if further studies verify this first one, then the type of help they'll get will be affected. All of which might be OK, writes Jillian Keenan at Slate. "If we turn every single quirk of human sexuality into a 'disease,' after all, then we’re all screwed." The study is in the journal Socioaffective Neuroscience & Psychology.