Implicit attitudes and executive control interact to regulate interest in extra-pair relationships

• Published in: Cognitive, affective, & behavioral neuroscience Vol. 17; no. 6; pp. 1210 - 1220
• Main Authors: Ueda, Ryuhei, Yanagisawa, Kuniaki, Ashida, Hiroshi, Abe, Nobuhito
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Springer US 01-12-2017; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Adultery; Alternatives; Attitudes; Behavior; Behavioral Science and Psychology; Cognition & reasoning; Cognitive Psychology; Decision making; Executive function; Females; Functional magnetic resonance imaging; Go/no-go discrimination learning; Hypotheses; Males; Monogamy; Neurosciences; NMR; Nuclear magnetic resonance; Personality; Psychology; Self control; Social psychology; fMRI; Self-control; Monogamy; Dual-process theory; Implicit social cognition
• ISSN: 1530-7026; 1531-135X
• DOI: 10.3758/s13415-017-0543-7

Do we actively maintain monogamous relationships by force of will, or does monogamy flow automatically? During functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), male participants in a romantic relationship performed the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to evaluate implicit attitudes toward adultery and a go/no-go task to measure prefrontal activity implicated in explicit executive control. Subsequently, they were engaged in a date-rating task in which they rated how much they wanted to date unfamiliar females. We found that the individuals with higher prefrontal activity during go/no-go task could regulate the interest for dates with unattractive females; moreover, the individuals with both a stronger negative attitude toward adultery and higher prefrontal activity could regulate their interest for dates with attractive females, and such individuals tended to maintain longer romantic relationships with a particular partner. These results indicate that regulation of amorous temptation via monogamous relationship is affected by the combination of automatic and reflective processes.