Drinking beer ‘lowers inhibitions and makes it easier for women to look at porn’
Women loosen up more than men after being shown explicit pictures
GIRLS who drink beer are less shy about sex, a study suggests.
Volunteers who had half a litre found it easier to look at explicit pictures — but women loosened up more than men.
Beer also made people more attracted to happy faces.
It could explain “beer goggles”, when people seem to get more attractive as more booze is drunk.
But researchers from Basel University Hospital in Switzerland reported no change in sexual arousal levels.
They gave half of the 60 volunteers beer and the rest non-alcoholic beer.
They then set them tests covering facial recognition, empathy and sexual arousal.
The results were presented at a conference in Austria.
Professor Wim van den Brink, of Amsterdam University, said: “This is an interesting study confirming conventional wisdom that alcohol is a social lubricant and that moderate use of alcohol makes people happier, more social and less inhibited when it comes to sexual engagement.
“The sex differences in the findings can either be explained by differences in blood alcohol concentration between males and females with the same alcohol intake, differences in tolerance due to differences in previous levels of alcohol consumption or by socio-cultural factors.”
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Lead researcher Professor Matthias Liechti, from Basel University Hospital in Switzerland, said: “The effect of many medications and substances of abuse have been tested on various tests of emotion processing and social cognition.
“However, although many people drink beer and know its effects through personal experience, there is surprisingly little scientific data on its effects on the processing of emotional social information.
“We found that drinking a glass of beer helps people see happy faces faster, and enhances concern for positive emotional situations.
“Alcohol also facilitates the viewing of sexual images, consistent with disinhibition, but it does not actually enhance sexual arousal.
“These effects of alcohol on social cognition likely enhance sociability.”