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Attention and Emotional Responses to Sexual Stimuli and Their Relationship to Sexual Desire

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Abstract

Little is known about why individuals vary in their levels of sexual desire. Information processing models, like Barlow’s (Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 54:140–148, 1986) model of sexual functioning, suggest that individuals with higher sexual desire attend more and respond with more pleasant emotions to sexual cues than individuals with lower levels of sexual desire. In this study, 69 participants (36 women, 33 men) completed a dot detection task measuring attention capture by sexual stimuli and a startle eyeblink modulation task indexing the valence of emotional response to affective stimuli. Participants with high levels of sexual desire were slower to detect targets in the dot detection task that replaced sexual images but did not differ in startle eyeblink responses to sexual stimuli. The results suggest that the amount of attention captured by sexual stimuli is a stronger predictor of a person’s sexual desire level than the valence of the emotional responses elicited by such stimuli.

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Notes

  1. In our sample, however, the subscales correlated significantly (r(67) = .49, p < .001).

  2. International Affective Picture System images probed—Unpleasant: 2490, 2590, 2730, 3000, 3053, 3080, 3100, 3170, 3266, 3350, 3530, 8485,9331, 9190, 9220, 9520, 9040, 9042, 9050, 9250; Neutral: 2020, 2050,2190, 2206, 2235, 2272, 2393, 2435, 2485, 2499,2516, 2570, 2579, 2695, 2745, 2830, 5395, 7205, 8496, 9472; Pleasant-Sexual: 4141, 4250, 4310, 4607, 4660, 4677, 4680, 4750, 4770; Pleasant-Nonsexual: 1601, 2260, 2299, 2387, 2791, 2510, 5621,5623,7502, 8030, 8031,8033, 8034, 8080, 8185, 8186, 8420, 8503, 8190, 8400; Spiering et al. sexual images probed: 001, 003, 004, 005, 011, 012, 033, 038, 120, 127, 128.

  3. While we did not have any specific hypotheses about gender effects, some readers may wish to see those exploratory analyses to possibly guide future research in this area. Thus, any gender effects are footnoted for each section. For valence ratings, there was a significant interaction of Gender × Slide Type, F(3, 195) = 10.31, p < .001, \( \eta ^{2}_{p} = .14 \). Contrasts indicated that women rated the sexual images as less pleasant than men as compared to the pleasant nonsexual images, F(1, 65) = 17.00, p < .001, \( \eta ^{2}_{p} = .21 \), more similar to the neutral images than men did F(1, 65) = 11.77, p = .001, \( \eta ^{2}_{p} = .15 \), and not as different from the unpleasant images F(1, 65) = 5.54, p = .022, \( \eta ^{2}_{p} = .08 \). Also, women rated the neutral images as more similarly pleasant to the sexual images than men F(1, 65) = 11.77, p = .001, \( \eta ^{2}_{p} = .15 \), and women rated the difference in valence between the neutral and unpleasant stimuli as much greater compared to men F(1, 65) = 5.86, p = .018, \( \eta ^{2}_{p} = .08 \).

  4. There was a significant main effect of Gender F(1, 65) = 8.46, p = .005, \( \eta ^{2}_{p} = .12 \), but the interaction was not significant. Men rated the images as more arousing than women.

  5. For sexual arousal ratings, there was also a main effect of Gender, F(1, 65) = 10.08, p = .002, \( \eta ^{2}_{p} = .13 \), and a Gender × Slide Type interaction, F(3, 195) = 15.97, p < .001, \( \eta ^{2}_{p} = .18 \). Contrasts indicated that men rated the sexual images as significantly more sexually arousing than the pleasant, F(1, 65) = 17.93, p < .001, \( \eta ^{2}_{p} = .22 \), neutral, F(1, 65) = 16.92, p < .001, \( \eta ^{2}_{p} = .21 \), and unpleasant, F(1, 65) = 15.47, p < .05, \( \eta ^{2}_{p} = .19 \), images as compared to women.

  6. There was no significant main or interaction effect of gender in this task.

  7. There was no significant main or interaction effect of gender in this task.

  8. Correspondingly, in this study higher Sexual Desire scores were positively correlated with pleasantness (r = .59) and sexual arousal (r = .46) ratings of the sexual stimuli.

  9. Some researchers have conceptualized inhibition of return as the outcome of difficulty disengaging a stimulus (Fox et al., 2002), but disengagement and inhibition of return can be separated experimentally (e.g., Landry & Bryson, 2004) and neurophysiologically (Dias & Bruce, 1994) and will be discussed here as separate processes.

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Acknowledgments

Work on this article was supported, in part, by the Social Science Research Council’s Dissertation Fellowship to the first author. The authors wish to thank the laboratory assistants whose work contributed to this project: Katie Wilkinson, Jamaica Slicer, Valerie Tolbert, and Jen Volmer. For their helpful comments, we would like to thank Andrew Mathews, Ph.D. and the members of the Psychopathology and Neuropsychometry Laboratory Reading Group at Indiana University: Paul D. Kieffaber, Chad R. Edwards, Emily S. Kappenman, and Christine A. Carroll.

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  1. Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University, 1101 E. 10th St, Bloomington, IN, 47405-7007, USA

    Nicole Prause, Erick Janssen & William P. Hetrick

  2. The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA

    Nicole Prause & Erick Janssen

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Prause, N., Janssen, E. & Hetrick, W.P. Attention and Emotional Responses to Sexual Stimuli and Their Relationship to Sexual Desire. Arch Sex Behav 37, 934–949 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-007-9236-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-007-9236-6

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