Psychologists are investigating how Hentai consumers differ from non-Hentai consumers
According to new research published in the journal Sexologies, people who consume hentai appear to differ in several ways from those who consume other types of pornography.
However, they do not appear to be any different from others in terms of their attraction to humans or desire for a human relationship.
The study, “The differentiation between consumers of hentai pornography and human pornography“, was authored by Jonathan I. Park, Mehmet K. Mahmut, and Anna Blomkvist.
The purpose of the study was to determine whether hentai consumers differed from other pornography consumers in terms of attachment style, attraction to, and desire for romantic relationships with anime characters and humans.
Hentai is a popular pornographic subgenre based on anime, a Japanese animation style.
Although many studies have been conducted to investigate psychological factors related to pornographic consumption, little research has been conducted specifically on hentai.
Jonathan Park, the study's author, said that his interest in Japanese culture fueled his desire to research the subject.
Figure 1. Images of the anime character and humans for rating task. Note: The image on the left is a fan art by the artist Tokki (2018) of the anime character Enterprise from the video game Azur lane (Manjuu and Yongshi, 2017). The image on the right is an image of a swimsuit model from the RVCA shopping website (RVCA, n.d.). Note: The image on the left is a depiction of an anime character drawn by the artist Haribo (Haribo, 2018). The image on the right is of the model Frankly Cammarata (Cammarata, 2018).
Figure 2. Error bars represent standard errors.
The study was based on survey responses from 208 participants, who were all between the ages of 20 and 90.
Approximately 29% had consumed hentai in the previous year, 38% had consumed non-hentai pornography in the previous year, and 33% had not consumed any pornography in the previous year.
Unsurprisingly, hentai consumers found anime character images more appealing than non-hentai and non-porn consumers.
However, hentai consumers did not find real-life images of people to be any more or less attractive than non-hentai or non-porn consumers.
You can find the research paper here.