Determining women's sexual self-schemas through advanced computerized text analysis

Abstract

The meaning extraction method (MEM), an advanced computerized text analysis technique, was used to analyze women’s sexual self-schemas. Participants (n = 239) completed open-ended essays about their personal feelings associated with sex and sexuality. These essays were analyzed using the MEM, a procedure designed to extract common themes from natural language. Using the MEM procedure, we extracted seven unique themes germane to sexual self-schemas: family and development, virginity, abuse, relationship, sexual activity, attraction, and existentialism. Each of these themes is comprised of frequently used words across the participants’ descriptions of their sexual selves. Significant differences in sexual self-schemas were observed to covary with age, relationship status, and sexual abuse history.

049 Changes in the Sexual Self-Schema of Women with a History of Childhood Sexual Abuse Following Expressive Writing Treatment

“…Author Manuscript Author Manuscript attraction schema was previously found to differ between women with and without a history of CSA, with abused women showing a greater prominence of this schema than non-abused women (Stanton et al, 2015). Two notable patterns of sexual behavior have been observed in women with a history of CSA: hypersexuality and hyposexuality (Rellini, 2008).…”

“…Hypersexuality has been posited to be related to high impulsivity. It is possible that some of the abused women in the current study had a history of hypersexuality, which might have been expressed through a higher use of the attraction schema in their pre-treatment essays.As treatment helped women to process their abuse history, their tendency towards impulsivity and hypersexuality may have decreased, which was then reflected through a reduction in the attraction schema.Previous research has shown that non-abused women write about the relationship schema, which focuses on intimacy and connection with a romantic partner, more than abused women (Stanton et al, 2015); therefore we predicted that abused women would write about this schema more over time. Consistent with our hypothesis, the relationship schema showed a significant increase in prominence between the pre-treatment and post-treatment assessments (Figure 1 Panel D), yet this increase was not maintained over time in the followup sessions.…”

“…Until recently sexual self-schemas were exclusively assessed with self-report instruments. Recent research using the Meaning Extraction Method (MEM), an inductive method of topic modeling, identified seven unique themes of sexual self-schemas: family and development, virginity, abuse, relationship, sexual activity, attraction, and existentialism from essays of 239 women (Stanton, Boyd, Pulverman, & Meston, 2015). In the current study, these themes were used to examine changes in theme prominence after an expressive writing treatment Method-Women (N = 138) with a history of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) completed a fivesession expressive writing treatment, and essays on sexual self-schemas written at pre-treatment and post-treatment were examined for changes in themes.…”

“…Sexual selfschemas have been associated with sexual function in women: women with greater positive sexual self-schemas report higher sexual function than women with lower positive sexual self-schemas (Andersen, Woods, & Copeland, 1997;Rellini, Ing, & Meston, 2011). Historically, sexual self-schemas have been assessed with a self-report instrument composed of a trait-adjective rating scale that provides scores for two independent positive themes: passion/romance and openness to sexual experience, and one independent negative theme: embarrassment/conservatism (Andersen & Cyranowski, 1994).The Meaning Extraction Method (MEM), a topic modeling method for natural language analysis, was recently used to extract sexual self-schema themes from women's open-ended expressive writing essays on their sexuality (Stanton et al, 2015). This process generated seven unique themes including family and development, virginity, abuse, relationship, sexual activity, attraction, and existentialism, in contrast to the three themes measured by the sexual self-schema self-report instrument (Andersen & Cyranowski, 1994).…”

“…The MEM has previously been used to examine diverse constructs such as . In addition to the identification of seven unique themes of women's sexual self-schemas, Stanton et al (2015) reported differences in the prominence of themes by demographic characteristics. Importantly, women with a history of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) wrote about the abuse and attraction themes more than their non-abused counterparts.…”