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

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.

The DSM Diagnostic Criteria for Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder in Women

“…Certainly, when women are asked about the distinction between desire and subjective arousal, many express conflation . One way that desire and arousal may be distinguished is that desire is the subjective experience of a willingness to behave sexually Arch Sex Behav (2010) 39:221-239 225 whereas arousal is the subjective experience of genital changes (Laan & Both, 2008;Prause, Janssen, & Hetrick, 2008). Supporting this incentive-motivation model of sexual desire in women are data which show the large number of cues which provoke sexual desire (125) and sexual activity (237) in women (McCall & Meston, 2006, 2007Meston & Buss, 2007).…”

Exploring the Relationship between Sexual Compulsivity and Attentional Bias to Sex-Related Words in a Cohort of Sexually Active Individuals

“…Despite research demonstrating a link between sexual compulsivity, risky sexual behaviours [7] and the occurrence of sexually transmitted infections [8,9] , that sex addiction and other compulsive behaviours frequently co-occur [10] , and share a common neurobiology in terms of brain regions, which process rewards from behaviours [6,11,12] , relatively little is known about those cognitive indices that are likely to characterise the effects of sexual compulsivity [9] . If we accept that sexual compulsivity and other addictive behaviours are likely to share common aetiology, one possible avenue for the exploration of the effects of sexual compulsivity on behaviour is to utilise contemporary proposals about the central role of attentional processes in understanding addictive behaviours and their role in providing potential therapeutic benefits [13] .…”

Latent Structures of Female Sexual Functioning

“…Moreover, new definitions of sexual desire highlight its interrelation with arousal. For example, Prause, Janssen, and Hetrick (2008) conceptualized sexual desire as the predisposition to attend and respond subjectively to sexual stimuli, representing the cognitive valence of sexual arousal. The concepts of desire and subjective sexual arousal are both often invoked in models of sexual desire, although the distinction between them is not empirically supported (Meana, 2010).…”