Jim Pfaus - President's Conference Series: Understanding Desire, Session 3

Pfaus' research is centered around understanding how the brain is wired for sex. He and his research team study the hormonal and neurochemical mechanisms involved in sexual arousal, desire, reward (pleasure) and inhibition in rat models. His work in rats has elucidated basic neural and neurochemical pathways, and recent work has helped to illustrate how learning plays a critical role in sexual function and dysfunction, especially how experience with sexual pleasure feeds forward to generate desire. His work in humans focuses on subjective and objective measures of sexual desire in women and men and how different types of erotic stimuli alter such measures. He also examines the sexual functioning of individuals under stress or with anxiety disorders, and the effects of drugs abuse on sexual behavior in both animals and humans.