The Effects of Pornography on the Developing Child

Part one of a two-part report by Marilyn Hawes

According to The Journal of The American Medical Association (2014), "Pornography consumption is associated with decreased brain volume in the right striatum, decreased left striatum activation, and lower functional connectivity to the prefrontal cortex”.

Pornography addiction and its effect on sleep, work and relationships

The most basic effect of watching too much internet porn or even gaming is how it affects sleep. People end up ‘wired and tired’ and unable to concentrate on work next day. Constant bingeing and seeking that dopamine reward hit, can lead to a deep habit that is hard to kick. It can also cause ‘pathological’ learning in the form of addiction. That is when a user continues to seek a substance or activity despite negative consequences – such as problems at work, home, in relationships etc.

A compulsive user experiences negative feelings such as depression or feeling flat when he or she misses the hit or excitement. This drives them back to it, again and again, to try and restore feelings of arousal. Addiction can start when trying to cope with stress, but also causes a user to feel stressed too. It is a vicious cycle.

When our internal biology is out of balance, our rational brain tries to interpret what is going on based on past experience. Low dopamine and depletion of other related neurochemicals can produce unpleasant feelings. They include boredom, hunger, stress, tiredness, low energy, anger, craving, depression, loneliness and anxiety. How we ‘interpret’ our feelings and the possible cause of the distress, affects our behaviour. Not until people quit porn do they realise that their habit has been the cause of so much negativity in their lives.

“Teens and pre-teens with highly plastic brains are compulsively using high-speed internet porn with their porn tastes becoming out of sync with their real-life sexuality.” (Psychology Today, 2016)

Over stimulation

The effect of watching too much highly stimulating porn can lead to a hangover and depressive symptoms too. It may be hard to see how consuming porn and consuming drugs can have the same general effect on the brain, but it does. The brain responds to stimulation, chemical or otherwise. However, the effects don’t stop at a hangover.

The work of Diane Andrews and Nicole McGuffin

Diana Andrews, a Colorado-based psychologist has done significant work in the way that pornography affects schoolchildren.

Andrews believes that the behaviour path of addiction can begin with a child or teen accidentally finding porn and then seeking it on purpose. They think about how and when they are going to access pornography throughout the day. They can create a ritual or routine around using it and ignore consequences or negative impacts on viewing porn. The desire can eventually lead to a need.

When asked “what defines pornography?”, Andrews responded “I would be willing to say if you are offended by it, it is probably under the umbrella of porn”.

During a lecture on pornography and the teenage mind, Counsellor Nicole McGuffin said: “Teen brains are tasked with neuronal wiring so they can reproduce in the future. Resting dopamine levels are lower than adults and, as a teenager responds to a stimulus, the amount of dopamine released is considerably greater. Because of this, their brains are more at risk for pornography addiction. In addition, learning about sex based on pornography is unrealistic. Associating sexual arousal to screens on the computer and phone leads to not being able to be aroused by real people. Finally, what happens is that no human being can compete with the vast amount of images the brain has been exposed to resulting in losing the appetite for real-world encounters.”

"The Heat of the Moment: The Effect of Sexual Arousal on Decision Making"

In this fascinating research “The Heat of the Moment: The Effect of Sexual Arousal on Decision Making“, by Dan Ariely and George Loewenstein, the results show that “the attractiveness of activities suggest sexual arousal acts as an amplifier of sorts” in young men.

“A secondary implication of our findings is that people seem to have only limited insight into the impact of sexual arousal on their own judgments and behaviour. Such an under-appreciation could be important for both individual and societal decision making."

"The most effective means of self-control is probably not willpower (which has been shown to be of limited efficacy), but rather avoiding situations in which one will become aroused and lose control. Any failure to appreciate the impact of sexual arousal on one’s own behavior is likely to lead to inadequate measures to avoid such situations. Similarly, if people under-appreciate their own likelihood of having sex, they are likely to fail to take precautions to limit the potential damage from such encounters. A teenager who embraces ‘‘just say no,’’ for example, may feel it unnecessary to bring a condom on a date, thus greatly increasing the likelihood of pregnancy or transmission of STDs if he/she ends up getting caught up in the heat of the moment.”

“The same logic applies interpersonally. If people judge others’ likely behaviour based on observing them when they are not sexually aroused and fail to appreciate the impact of sexual arousal, then they are likely to be caught by surprise by the other’s behaviour when aroused. Such a pattern could easily contribute to date rape. Indeed, it can create the perverse situation in which people who are the least attracted to their dates are most likely to experience date rape because being unaroused themselves they completely fail to understand or predict the other (aroused) person’s behaviour.”

“In sum, the current study shows that sexual arousal influences people in profound ways. This should come as no surprise to most people who have personal experience with sexual arousal, but the magnitude of the effects is nevertheless striking. At a practical level, our results suggest that efforts to promote safe, ethical sex should concentrate on preparing people to deal with the ‘‘heat of the moment’’ or to avoid it when it is likely to lead to self-destructive behaviour. Efforts at self-control that involve raw willpower (Baumeister & Vohs, 2003) are likely to be ineffective in the face of the dramatic cognitive and motivational changes caused by arousal.”

See the TEDx talk by Dan Ariely on Self Control.