Abstract
Being sexually aroused can lead to a stronger propensity to engage in sexual risk-taking and sexually coercive behaviors possibly by narrowing attentional focus toward immediate gratification rather than long-term consequences. The goal of this paper was to investigate the attentional processes implicated in sexual self-regulation failure and its moderating factors, namely having a stronger sensitivity to sexual cues (dual control model) or being less able to implement behavioral intentions (action control theory) following a first effortful task. A total of 82 young adult heterosexual men completed a Dot Probe task to assess their attentional bias toward sexual stimuli. Effortful control was manipulated using a Stroop task. Regardless of conditions, higher sexual excitability was predictive of a stronger attentional bias toward sexual cues, while higher inhibition due to threat of performance failure was predictive of a lower bias for such cues. In the experimental condition, action-oriented individuals were able to negate this attentional bias by staying more focused on the task, while state-oriented participants showed higher orientation toward the sexual cues and thus a higher bias. These results suggest that both higher-order processes, like intention implementation, and lower-order processes, like sexual inhibition and excitation systems, are the key to regulation failure.
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Notes
Reviewing the extensive literature on the replication crisis of ego depletion is beyond the scope of this paper. Different meta-analyses reached different conclusions regarding the putative effect size (Carter, Kofler, Forster, & McCullough, 2015; Carter & McCullough, 2014; Hagger, Wood, Stiff, & Chatzisarantis, 2010). Two preregistered multisite studies failed to replicate classical ego depletion effects (Hagger et al., 2016; Lurquin et al., 2016), yet have been criticized for the way they tried to manipulate the effect (Baumeister & Vohs, 2016; Dang, 2016). Other studies were successful (Dang et al., 2021; Garrison et al., 2019; Lin, Saunders, Friese, Evans, & Inzlicht, 2020), although with lower effect sizes than previous studies. This decline in effect sizes in recent years could merely be a function of increases in study precision and decreased research bias (Vadillo, 2019).
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Nolet, K., Emond, F.C., Pfaus, J.G. et al. Sexual Attentional Bias in Young Adult Heterosexual Men: Attention Allocation Following Self-Regulation. Arch Sex Behav 50, 2531–2542 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-021-01928-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-021-01928-7