The effects of a subjective monitoring task in the physiological measure of genital response to erotic stimulation

Abstract

Instrumentation has been developed which promises to further our understanding of the relationship between cognitive and physiological factors in the sexual arousal process. Past research has examined this relationship by continuous measurement of genital response, and discrete posttest measurement of subjective arousal. The self-report or “cognitive lever” allows individuals to rate feelings of arousal continuously throughout a stimulus interval by positioning a lever device along a calibrated scale. In this way, structural patterns of physiological and cognitive response can be examined. However, since attention has been shown to be an important cognitive operation in the processing of sexual stimuli, there is concern that this subjective measuring task may confound laboratory assessment by altering genital responsivity through distractive or possibly facilitative mechanisms. In order to test the methodological limitations of the cognitive lever, 14 male and female college students were exposed to duplicate viewings of erotic videotapes while alternately using and not using the self-report device. Results indicated that lever usage was not obtrusive in females, but was in males to the point of altering physiological response. In addition, the study took advantage of the continuous, concurrent measurements and examined patterns of convergence and divergence between the two. Results of correlational analyses indicated, in line with past research, that for men greater degrees of erection result in significantly higher subjective-objective agreement. Patterns for women as a group were much less clear, with only two significant correlations appearing. Finally, the limitations of the cognitive lever were discussed.