Study: Males With Young Stay Loyal

March 30, 2005 — -- So a guy's sitting at a bar and a sweet young thing starts flirting. He's married, and he knows he should watch his step, but even though the conscience says no, the flesh is more than willing.

Would he be any less inclined to take that dangerous step toward promiscuity if, in addition to being married, he's also a dad?

If he's a dad, he'll almost certainly turn away and head back for the home and hearth, at least if he's a marmoset monkey. And quite likely if he's a human.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin's National Primate Research Center in Madison were themselves quite surprised to learn that being a parent makes a huge difference in the sexual proclivities of marmosets. These squirrel-sized monkeys have a social structure that is very similar to ours, more so than any other primates, so they are the object of much fascination among scientists.

It's not always easy to study the sex lives of humans because it's pretty hard to maintain all the necessary controls, says Toni Ziegler, an endocrinologist who studies the effect of the social environment on hormones and behavior. So Ziegler, a senior scientist at the Wisconsin center, teamed up with Charles Snowdon, chairman of the department of psychology, to see if male marmosets could shed a little light on an important subject.

They wanted to know what happens to hormone production when a male marmoset, and by extension possibly a human, gets turned on by a seductive female. Does the male's body begin immediately to produce the hormones associated with sex, like testosterone, when given some kind of stimulus, like the smell of a very friendly female?

The obvious answer would be yes, because marmosets have a well-known affection for affection.

"We had just started testing when I said 'wait a minute, these guys aren't showing the normal physiological response,' " Ziegler says.

Thirty marmosets were participating in the study and two-thirds did just what they were expected to do. Testosterone spiked within minutes, showing they were more than ready to monkey around.