FRANK-A-BEACH-AWARD - HOMOLOGIES OF ANIMAL AND HUMAN SEXUAL BEHAVIORS

Theoretical models of animal and human sexual behavior have evolved fr om two very different literatures, yet they contain many common behavi oral components that may reflect the action of similar neuroendocrine and neurochemical systems. The study of animal sexual behavior has bee n largely concerned with mechanisms that underlie the pattern of consu mmatory behaviors observed during copulation, behaviors that tend to b e highly stereotyped, sexually differentiated, and species-specific. T here are important species differences in the behavioral topography, e ndocrine control, and neural substrates of consummatory behaviors, whi ch tend to be extreme when comparing animals and humans. Although this has led to an increased interest in comparative animal behavior, it h as also helped to foster a general perception that animals and humans are fundamentally different. In contrast to consummatory behaviors, ap petitive behaviors (which serve to bring animals and humans into conta ct with sexual incentives) are more flexible, less sexually differenti ated, and less species-specific and span a variety of situations other than sexual interactions. Appetitive behaviors are thus viewed as ''s exually specific'' when they are displayed under sexual circumstances and reinforced by sexual incentives. Interestingly, an appetitive/cons ummatory dichotomy has emerged in the human literature which distingui shes measures of sexual desire or arousal from ''performance'' measure s of masturbation or copulation. In fact, sexual desire, which reflect s fantasy and behavioral excitement, has been further differentiated f rom sexual arousal, which reflects genital blood flow. The present ana lysis attempts to pull together these seemingly disparate literatures into a coherent theoretical framework that emphasizes similarities and differences in the structure of sexual behavior across rats and human s. (C) 1996 Academic Press, Inc.