Assessing differences in physiologic subjective response toward male and female orientated sexually explicit videos in heterosexual individuals

Abstract

The goal of the present study was to examine sexual response to male- and female- oriented sexually explicit films in heterosexual men and women. Forty participants (20 men and 20 women; mean age=29.42 years) attended three separate lab sessions. One 15 minute sexually explicit video was shown per session. For session one, all participants viewed a female-oriented film selected by the experimenters. The films used for subsequent sessions were counterbalanced male-oriented or female-oriented clips that had been previously studied. A thermographic camera measured temperature on the penile shaft for men and labia for women. Continuous and discrete self-reported sexual arousal was also obtained. Genital temperature was averaged into 15 one-minute bins and a repeated-measures ANOVA was conducted. Men demonstrated significantly greater increases in temperature over time than women, F (14, 980)=19.27, p=.000, however there were no significant differences between films or sex × film interaction. Women reported significantly higher subjective sexual arousal to the films than men, F (1, 69) range=3.89 to 9.67, p range=.01 to .05, but there were no significant differences between films or a sex × film interaction. Results suggest that film orientation has minimal impact on physiologic sexual responsiveness in men or women. Although both sexes demonstrated significant increases in sexual arousal for these pre-selected films, future laboratory research would benefit from examining whether participant-selected stimuli produces a greater response than experimenter-selected films.

A review of infrared thermography as applied to human sexual psychophysiology

“…3 In these studies, the duration of RTB audiovisual stimuli for each participant varied according to the amount of time required for genital temperature to return to baseline; this duration did not significantly differ between men and women (M = 7.05, SD = 2.08). Kukkonen et al, 2007Kukkonen et al, , 2010Landry et al, 2016;Parada et al, 2018). It may be argued that this difference may be accounted for by the anatomical differences in genital structure rather than by higher levels of arousal, since previous studies have mainly used dissimilar anatomical ROIs across sexes (i.e., penile shaft and labia majora).…”

“…The skin temperature increase recorded by thermography was again found to be specific to genital regions since there were no significant changes in the non-genital control areas, i.e., the thigh (e.g., Huberman and Chivers, 2015;Kukkonen et al, 2007Kukkonen et al, , 2010. Thermal imaging has also demonstrated to clearly differentiate between sexual arousal and control conditions (neutral, humor, and anxiety control conditions; e.g., Huberman and Chivers, 2015;Landry et al, 2016). Studies using both positive (humor) and anxiety control groups (e.g., Kukkonen et al, 2010) provided additional discriminant validity for genital temperature as a measure of sexual arousal and were in line with previous research using such control groups while using other psychophysiological measures (Both et al, 2003;Kukkonen et al, 2007;Laan et al, 1995;Prause et al, 2005).…”

“…Differences between men and women have been found regarding the patterns of genital temperature change in response to erotic stimuli. Men's baseline genital temperatures were found to be lower than women's and to show greater increases than women's during the erotic film (Kukkonen et al, 2010;Landry et al, 2016;Parada et al, 2018). Some studies reported similar patterns of temperature change during the erotic clips between men and women, with no significant differences in the time necessary to reach peak temperature (men took approximately 11 min and women took approximately 12 min), suggesting similarity in the pattern of sexual response between the sexes (Kukkonen et al, 2007(Kukkonen et al, , 2010.…”