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Perceptions of Sexual Images: Factors Influencing Responses to the Ubiquitous External Ejaculation

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Abstract

The debate over pornography has drawn attention to sex differences not only in the frequency of pornography consumption but also in the different ways males and females may perceive sexually explicit images and respond to them. Some of these differences may be due to sex differences in a variety of factors including sexual strategies and disgust, in particular, disgust related to pathogen avoidance. There is a large literature that focuses on how pathogen avoidance has shaped human behavior from political ideology to in-group/outgroup behavior to sexual risk taking/avoidance. This study examined sex differences in perceptions and how they are influenced by the emotional context of the image as well as individual difference factors, including disgust sensitivity, mate value, sociosexuality, and sexual orientation. Participants viewed a series of sexually explicit images of external ejaculations and rated them in terms of being positive, neutral, or negative. The factors accounting for the greatest variance in perceptions were target affect and sex, sexual orientation, and respondent sex, followed by pathogen and sexual disgust, self-perceived mate value, and sociosexual attitudes and desire.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank our two anonymous reviewers and editor for their feedback which improved the final manuscript.

Funding

This study was supported by an internal faculty research grant from the University of Redlands.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Psychology Department, University of Redlands, Redlands, CA, 92373, USA

    Catherine A. Salmon & Jessica A. Hehman

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  1. Catherine A. Salmon
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  2. Jessica A. Hehman
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Correspondence to Catherine A. Salmon.

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Human and Animal Rights

All procedures performed in this study were approved and in accordance with the ethical standards of the University of Redlands’ Institutional Review Board for research involving human participants.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Salmon, C.A., Hehman, J.A. Perceptions of Sexual Images: Factors Influencing Responses to the Ubiquitous External Ejaculation. Arch Sex Behav 51, 1271–1280 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-021-01993-y

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