Turns out if you like a lot of sex you just like a lot of sex. You're a horny bastard, plain and simple.

Researchers at UCLA recently got to the bottom of sex-addiction-as-mental-disorder and agreed with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders:

It's not a mental disorder. Sorry. No time off work. No woe-is-me. No extra-good drugs from the doc.

UCLA researchers led by Nicole Prause of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior monitored the brain activity of 39 men and 13 women using electroencephalography (EEG).

Their brain responses to sexual imagery showed no difference between those believed to be “hypersexual” and those simply in the mood, essentially.

In other words, people with alleged sex addiction are just horny like anybody else. UCLA:

Credit: Lindsay Grant / Flickr

Credit: Lindsay Grant / Flickr

A diagnosis of hypersexuality or sexual addiction is typically associated with people who have sexual urges that feel out of control, who engage frequently in sexual behavior, who have suffered consequences such as divorce or economic ruin as a result of their behaviors, and who have a poor ability to reduce those behaviors.

But, said Prause and her colleagues, such symptoms are not necessarily representative of an addiction — in fact, non-pathological, high sexual desire could also explain this cluster of problems.

A key finding: Those who would otherwise be sex addicts didn't show off-the-chart reactions to sexual images the way cocaine addicts reacted to images of drugs in other experiments, researchers said.

Researcher Prause:

The brain's response to sexual pictures was not predicted by any of the three questionnaire measures of hypersexuality. Brain response was only related to the measure of sexual desire. In other words, hypersexuality does not appear to explain brain responses to sexual images any more than just having a high libido.

In other words, you're just a pig. Enjoy yourself.

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