- Semen makes you happy. That's the remarkable conclusion
of a study comparing women whose partners wear condoms with those whose
partners don't.
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- The study, which is bound to provoke controversy, showed
that the women who were directly exposed to semen were less depressed.
The researchers think this is because mood-altering hormones in semen are
absorbed through the vagina. They say they have ruled out other explanations.
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- "I want to make it clear that we are not advocating
that people abstain from using condoms," says Gordon Gallup, the psychologist
at the State University of New York who led the team. "Clearly an
unwanted pregnancy or a sexually transmitted disease would more than offset
any advantageous psychological effects of semen."
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- Suicide attempts
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- His team divided 293 female students into groups depending
on how often their partners wore condoms, and assessed their happiness
using the Beck Depression Inventory, a standard questionnaire for assessing
mood. People who score over 17 are considered moderately depressed.
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- The team found that women whose partners never used condoms
scored 8 on average, those who sometimes used them scored 10.5, those who
usually used them scored 15 and those who always used them scored 11.3.
Women who weren't having sex at all scored 13.5.
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- What's more, the longer the interval since they last
had sex, the more depressed the women who never or sometimes used condoms
got. But the time since the last sexual encounter made no difference to
the mood of women who usually or always used condoms.
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- The team also found that depressive symptoms and suicide
attempts were more common among women who used condoms regularly compared
with those who didn't. The results will appear in the journal Archives
of Sexual Behavior.
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- And Gallup told New Scientist that his team already has
unpublished data from a larger group of 700 women confirming these findings.
In this study, the always-use-condoms group were more depressed than the
usually-use-condoms group, suggesting the discrepancy in the smaller study
was a sampling error, he says.
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- Alternative explanations
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- But is it really the semen that affects women's mood?
The researchers say they looked at alternative explanations such as whether
women who seldom use condoms took oral contraceptives, how often they had
sex, the strength of relationships, and the possibility that having a certain
type of personality influenced the decision to use condoms. But none of
these factors can explain their findings, they say.
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- In fact, the results aren't a complete surprise because
semen does contain several mood-altering hormones, including testosterone,
oestrogen, follicle-stimulating hormone, luteinising hormone, prolactin
and several different prostaglandins. Some of these have been detected
in a women's blood within hours of exposure to semen.
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- The question many people will ask is whether oral sex
could have the same mood-enhancing effects. "Since the steroids in
birth control pills survive the digestion process, I would assume that
the same holds true for at least some of the chemicals in semen,"
Gallup says.
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- "I understand that among some gay males who have
anal intercourse, it is not uncommon to attempt to retain the semen for
extended periods of time," he adds. "Suggesting, of course, that
there may be psychological effects." But further research will be
needed to confirm whether exposure to semen through oral or anal sex really
does affect mood in heterosexual or homosexual partners.
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- But why should semen have such an effect? "It makes
no sense to me for this phenomenon to have evolved," says Satoshi
Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
But Gallup counters that men whose semen promotes long-term mood enhancement
might have more chances to indulge in sexual activity.
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- http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992457
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