with the ability to represent events that may occur in the future. Application to risky behavior The somatic marker hypothesis has been applied to trying to understand risky behaviors, such as risky sexual behavior and drug addiction. According to the hypothesis, riskier sexual behaviors are more exhilarating and pleasurable, and therefore they are more likely to stimulate repetitive engagement in such behaviors. When this idea was tested in individuals who were infected with HIV and were substance dependent, differences were found between persons who scored well in the Iowa gambling test, and those who scored poorly. The high scorers showed a correlation between the amount of distress they reported having over their HIV status, and their acceptance of risk during sexual behavior – the greater the distress, the greater the risk that these people would take. The low scorers, on the other hand, showed no such correlation. These results were interpreted as indicating that persons with intact decision-making abilities are better able to rely on past emotional experiences when weighing risks, than are persons who are deficient in such abilities, and that acceptance of risk serves to ameliorate emotional distress. Drug abusers are thought to ignore the negative consequences of addiction while seeking drugs. According to the somatic marker hypothesis, such abusers are impaired in their ability to recall and consider past unpleasant experiences when weighing whether to consider drug seeking behaviors. Researchers analyzed the neuroendocrine responses of substance-dependent individuals and healthy individuals after being shown pleasant or unpleasant images. In response to unpleasant images, drug users showed decreased levels of several neuroendocrine markers, including norepinephrine, cortisol, and adrenocorticotropic hormone. Addicts showed lesser responses to both pleasant and unpleasant images, suggesting that they may have a diminished emotional response. Neuroimaging studies utilizing fMRI indicate that drug-related stimuli have the ability to activate brain regions involved in emotional evaluation and reward processing. When shown a film of people smoking cocaine, cocaine users showed greater activation of the anterior cingulate cortex, the right inferior parietal lobe, and the caudate nucleus than did non-users. Conversely, the cocaine users showed lesser activation when viewing a sex film than did non-users. Criticism Some researchers believe that the use of somatic markers (i.e., afferent feedback) would be a very inefficient method of influencing behavior. Damasio's notion of the as-if experience dependent feedback route, whereby bodily responses are re-represented utilizing the somatosensory cortex (postcentral gyrus), also proposes