Post: #1

Is rampant infidelity a disorder that can be cured?

Diane

Post: #2

I don't think it can, at least not without a high recidivism rate. Sexual addiction, triggers the same pleasure center and reward circuits in the brain as drug addiction, and the relapse rate of drug addicts in our prison system is at over 95% for those who have gone through treatment programs.

Dopamine is retty damn powerful, and our brain isn't really logical when it comes to what it wants. The brains desire for dopamine will rip a persons life to shreds, leave them homeless, penniless and non-functional, all for the short lived high it gets from a dopamine rush.

Beyond that obstacle, I don't really consider infidelity a disorder, as species propagation is a deeply seated instinct, and monogamy is counter productive to evolution, and very few species are monogamous.

I remember reading several years ago that scientists were able to regulate monogamy in prarie vole's and identified vasopression as the chemical responsible for monogamy. It's not been conclusively proven that vasopressin has the same effect on humans, but I would consider it likely. Here's an interesting article on the subject from ABS News:

If only we could find a way to bottle dopamine and vasopressin and make them work like pheromones!

Post: #3

Very interesting, Mark.

I pulled this from Wiki, re: vasopressin.

Quote:Vasopressin receptors distributed along the reward circuit pathway, specifically in the ventral pallidum, are activated when AVP is released during social interactions such as mating, in monogamous prairie voles. The activation of the reward circuitry reinforces this behavior leading to conditioned partner preference, and thereby initiates the formation of a pair bond.

It is very interesting that this molecule is quite similar in structure and function to oxytocin.

But, it is way too heavy to be able to act like a pheromone.

If this substance creates conditioned bonding in humans the same way it does in voles (I'd like to see those studies!), then the key would be finding out if there are any pheromones that act on the pathways that lead to release of vasopressin from the hypothalmus... and that may very well be doable at some point.

But that speculation might be moot. If let's say infidelity is caused by a lack of release of vasopressin, and a pheromone could help that, that would be great. But if infidelity was caused by an insensitivity to vasopressin, rather than a shortage of it, no amount of pressure from the other end would matter. Or if the problem were a breakage in the pathway somewhere along the line from stimulus to release that was inherited, no amount of pressure would work either. Or if there were gross abnormalities of the hypothalmus, so that it just doesn't work the way it should, nothing will fix that.

That is probably a little confusing. I guess what I'm getting at is some people are broken and you can't fix it, especially if it is genetic.

Oh, and thinking about this issue in evolutionary terms, evolution favors both monogamy and infidelity, not one or the other. Infidelity scatters the genes around. But monogamy ensures survival of the mother and the offspring. Thinking in purely evolutionary terms, it would be more survival oriented for more women to be unfaithful than men. That way they could ensure the best genes and survival of their offspring.

But rarely do any of us act for reasons of evolutionary fitness. Otherwise we wouldn't have any social programs, and it would be a dog-eat-dog norm. Instead most people try to order their world for their own best interest and for the health of the community.

That is why we are socialized, and why there are standards set down for every community, and why unfaithfulness is so frowned upon, and so very rarely condoned.

Diane