Placebo Pill Gives Boost to Some Women's Sex Drive

About one-third of women given a placebo pill to treat a low libido reported improvements in their sex lives, a finding researchers say is evidence of the powerful and somewhat mysterious mind-body connection surrounding arousal and desire. After drugs like Viagra and Cialis revolutionized the treatment of male sexual dysfunction in the late 1990s, a flurry of clinical trials were conducted in women in the hopes that the drugs could do the same to revive a woman's flagging sex drive. The drugs flopped in women. But recently, researchers went back and looked at the old data on Cialis and found that not only did about 35 percent of women given the placebo pill experience significant improvement in psychological aspects of sex such as desire, many reported improvements in the physical aspects of arousal, including better lubrication, more frequent orgasms or more easily attainable orgasms, according to the study.

"Everything across the board improved in some women," said study author Andrea Bradford, a post-doctoral fellow at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. The study is published in the current issue of the Journal of Sexual Medicine. In the original study, 50 women aged 35 to 55 who were diagnosed with female sexual arousal disorder were given either Cialis or a placebo for 12 weeks. The women, most of whom were married, were asked to have sex at least three times a month. "Many went above and beyond," Bradford noted. Women also had to keep a diary of how often they had sex and how satisfying it was. Bradford suspects the improvements were due to several aspects of the study the hope that the pill might be working plus speaking with medical professionals about sex, thinking about sex and trying to have better sex.

"I think just the act of attending to their sex lives was very therapeutic for some women," Bradford said. Over time, the frequency with which women had sex dropped some, but they continued to report better sex lives overall. "It was quality over quantity," she said. When sex is no longer satisfying, women tend to avoid it, noted Aline Zolbrod, a Boston-area clinical psychologist and sex therapist. Without at least giving it a try, there's little hope sex will get better. "I love this study," Zolbrod said. "It does what we'd like to get our patients to do, which is to start having sex again. Instead of getting into bed and sighing, 'Oh, this is never going to work,' instead they are getting into bed and thinking, 'Let's see what happens.' When you have that attitude and you have sex almost once a week, for some women it really did the trick."

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Anger Focuses Attention on Rewards, Not Threats: Study

Even though anger is a negative emotion, angry people tend to pay more attention to rewards than threats, a new study finds. Previous research has found that people with other types of negative emotions, such as fea or anxiety, tend to focus more on threat than reward. For example, they'll spend more time looking at a picture of a person holding a knife threateningly than a picture of a sexy couple. On the other hand, people experiencing a positive emotion such as excitement are drawn to rewards, explained Brett Q. Ford, of Boston College, and colleagues. "Emotions can vary in what they make you want to do. Fear is associated with a motivation to avoid, whereas excitement is associated with a motivation to approach.

It can make you want to seek out certain things, like rewards," Ford said in an Association for Psychological Science news release. In the study, volunteers were asked to write for 15 minutes about one of four personal memories, and were assigned to write about a time when they were angry, afraid, excited/happy, or felt little or no emotion. Depending on the emotion the participant had been assigned, a five-minute piece of music was played to reinforce the feeling.After completing the writing task, the volunteers were asked to look at two side-by-side pictures. The investigators used a device that monitors eye movement to determine how much time the volunteers spent focusing on each picture.

They found that volunteers who had been assigned to recall an angry memory spent more time looking at rewarding pictures, as did the people who recalled feeling happy and excited. The findings suggest that visual attention may not be related to negative versus positive emotions, but instead related to how a person's emotions motivate them. For example, anger might motivate someone to approach something in an aggressive way, while happiness might cause someone to want to approach things in a social or friendly way, the study authors noted in the news release. "Attention kicks off an entire string of events that can end up influencing behavior," the authors concluded in the news release. The study findings were released online in advance of publication in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science.

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