In this video I introduce the basics of sexual motivation and briefly describe hormones involved. Next I discuss some important differences between humans and other species when it comes to sexual motivation, including estrus and hidden fertility. I explain how these may help us to understand certain behaviors and jealousy in relationships.
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Video Transcript
Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In the previous videos I’ve talked about hunger motivation in some detail and so now I’d like to move on to a different type of motivation and this is sexual motivation. But as we’ll see these two actually have a lot in common and one of the first commonalities is that they both relate to survival. So when I talked about hunger signaling I mentioned the idea that if you never had any motivation to eat, if you never experienced any hunger, then you’d probably starve.
Now, similarly with sexual motivation, if members of the species were never motivated to engage in sexual behavior that would produce offspring, then these species probably wouldn’t survive very long. Now another commonality is that they both involve a number of different hormones and so sexual motivation involves hormones including testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, oxytocin, and vasopressin, and I’m not going to go into detail on each of these hormones in this video.
But another similarity with hunger here is that these just influence motivation. And so what I mean by that is no matter how hungry you get, you have some very strong hunger motivation it doesn’t guarantee certain behaviors. It doesn’t mean that you’ll start eating the food off the table next to you at the restaurant just because you have some level of ghrelin in your stomach. And so with sexual motivation the same is true. These hormones don’t guarantee certain fixed action patterns are going to occur. That if you have this level of these sex hormones that you are definitely going to do this or that, right? We can say that these hormones influence our motivation but they don’t directly regulate our behavior.
Alright, I’d also like to look at some differences between humans and other species and so one main difference is that in many other species, the females have a period of estrus or they’re “in heat“. And this word estrus comes from Latin for “frenzy” and so this is a period of time where the females are fertile and they’re receptive to sexual advances from males. And this might be the only time that they’re receptive to these sexual advances, depending on the species. And how often this occurs also varies amongst different species.
So in the case of rats, it happens every few days that the females will be receptive, whereas in other species like pandas it may only happen about once a year. Now, females, as I said, in humans do not have this period of estrus. So human females don’t go into heat, they don’t have estrus. But they do have a cycle of fertility; they ovulate on a monthly basis and it’s important to note that this ovulation doesn’t control their sexual behavior the way the estrus does in other species. So human females can engage in sexual behavior at any point during their cycle, regardless of whether they’re fertile or not at that time.
And a really good idea here is the idea of hidden fertility and this refers to the idea that males can’t tell when a human female is ovulating. So in other species, the fertility is not necessarily hidden, it may even be advertised. So you might be familiar with baboons that get big swollen bottoms when the female is in estrus, when she’s capable of becoming pregnant. And in other species like gelada monkeys the female gets bright red coloration on her chest and this is to tell the males, you know, “look I’m fertile, this is the time to mate”, right? And it helps influence the sexual motivation of the males. But humans don’t have this. We have this hidden fertility. Guys can’t tell when a female is fertile or not, when she’s capable of becoming pregnant or not.
And this relates to understanding things like what’s called “mate guarding“. This is the idea that males will stick around to try to ensure paternity with a particular female. So if a male can tell that a female is capable of becoming pregnant, then he’ll probably guard her and try to keep other male rivals away, so that he can ensure that he’s the one who impregnated her. But if there’s a time period where he can tell that she’s not capable of becoming pregnant, then he has less incentive to stick around and guard and protect against other potential suitors, right? And in humans we don’t have this clear visual cue that a female can’t get pregnant. We don’t know when she’s ovulating or not, and so one idea here is that this encourages males to stick around, right?
Because they never know when she might become pregnant and they want to ensure paternity, and this relates to a difference between males and females in that females can ensure that they’re the mother, right? They have ensured maternity. A female gives birth to a child, she can know for sure that that’s her child. But males don’t have this guarantee. They don’t know for certain that they are the father of that child, you know, always the potential doubt in their mind that somebody else is the father of this child. And so now they’re raising someone else’s genes rather than their own, and that’s a very high cost. So this can help us to understand differences between males and females when it comes to things like jealousy and different types of jealousy, you know, sexual jealousy versus emotional jealousy.
But that’s more detail than we’re gonna go into in this video. And I’d like to close by just pointing out the obvious and that is that, of course, sexual motivation is not just for reproduction. And we know many people are having sex hoping not to reproduce, right? And taking, you know, action to try to prevent reproduction from occurring and this means that there’s other motivations involved in sexual behavior. People have sex for many different reasons, not just reproduction. They might have sex to feel more attractive, they might have sex to strengthen their relationship with their partner, they might have sex to try to impress their friends, or they might have sex to try to inspire jealousy in other potential mates. Alright, so we have lots of other related motivations that can be involved in sexual behavior and so we have to make sure we’re not oversimplifying it too much when we think about it. Ok, so I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!
