For years the story on rat sex has been this: the male seeks above all else to ejaculate quickly, and once he has done it with one female, he is eager to move on to new partners. The female, meanwhile, seeks to extend the sex encounter through "pacing." A new study finds that if pacing is slow enough, the male will prefer that familiar partner to someone new. The wait, it seems, makes the female more attractive.

"It's an awful lot like what we were taught in high school," says Concordia University psychologist James Pfaus, who co-authored the study with Nafissa Ismail, the graduate student who conceived it.

The experiment made innovative use of standard research devices called pacing chambers, which are cages with dividers having either one or four holes big enough to let a female rat through but too small for the larger male. Thus, the female can join or leave the male, allowing her to significantly lengthen her arousal and, studies have shown, her chance of pregnancy. But the mating rituals last longer in the one-hole chambers, because the male, eager to get at the female, often sticks his big head in the hole, blocking her only passage back to his side and delaying her return.

The researchers let 20 couples mate in one-hole chambers and 20 in four-hole chambers. Then they placed each couple, along with a novel female, in a larger, open area. Among males from four-hole chambers, about half preferred their familiar mates. Among males who mated more slowly in the one-hole chambers, 80 percent preferred the familiar partner.

Driving this behavioral dynamic is, as always with rat sex, some neurochemical reward. Boston University biologist Mary Erskine notes that "sexual preferences come from chemical rewards, and we can be sure there are some here." Sexual climax, in fact, unleashes a flood of pleasure-producing hormones and neurotransmitters, such as testosterone and dopamine. Pfaus speculates that the higher level of arousal created by the longer wait generates a stronger release, and a more substantial reward, thereby enforcing the preference.

"Whether it's simply a stronger dose of the usual chemical rewards or some in addition, we don't know," Pfaus says. "But something is making this sort of mating more rewarding to the male or rewarding in a different way."

This article was originally published with the title Good Sex Is Not a Rat Race.

1 Comments

1. 1. Dr-Eric 02:55 PM 6/6/12

   Fortunately, I guess, rats do not know right from wrong....
   You had it right, initially, abstinence does work, it's the "so-called abstinence-only education" that doesn't work. If you study the problem, as a scientist (with the "reprovables" you relate of as your boss), you'll find that the problem, since 1980-89, as you relate, is another "macrocosmic difficulty" altogether, the problem of "counterfeit" that errodes (expands crime and debt) from the "top down" instead of the "bottom-up" as true sexual activities produce.....the "bud that was obstructed from flowering" was the problem, not the message itself........just as "joe isuzu" teaching you the "merits of honesty" wouldn't work, so too, a "counterfeit" teaching you the merits of "responsibility" doesn't work......get the real courses, from Unification Science's Discovery, and you'll solve the problem....and nothing else shall....as all else is either "fraudulent or counterfeit" (both causing similar, but different, dysfunction---one "top-down", the other "bottom-up", but, neither working, just the same---both "expanding crime and debt")...the real courses are at www.JoinUSRecovery.Blogspot.com and the other "9+ Unification Science Upgrades Needed To Eliminate the Deficit" are in my book's appendix at www.RecoveryEvents.R8.Org.....the young child on the film production company that says "I Made This", exemplifies the problem that opportunists have taken advantage of, since Reagan left.....

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