Implicit and Explicit Associations with Erotic Stimuli in Women with and Without Sexual Problems

Gender Differences in the Relationship of Sexual Functioning with Implicit and Explicit Sex Liking and Sex Wanting: A Community Sample Study

“…In men, better orgasmic functioning was associated with lower levels of implicit liking of erotic stimuli, but implicit sex-wanting associations did not correlate with any aspect of sexual functioning. These starkly contrasting findings, nevertheless, replicated results in previous studies of our research group in female and male patient samples with and without self-and clinician-diagnosed sexual dysfunctions (van Lankveld, Bandell et al, 2018;van Lankveld, de Jong, et al, 2018;van Lankveld et al, 2015), using similar methodology. The present findings in female participants are also similar to those of Dewitte (2015), who investigated a substantially younger sample.…”

Using Three Indirect Measures to Assess the Role of Sexuality-Related Associations and Interpretations for Women’s Sexual Desire: An Internet-Based Experimental Study

“…However, these studies are also subject to methodological difficulties and may not (adequately) capture more automatic or pre-attentive associations. Indirect measures may provide a complementary approach and studies using these measures found evidence for negative automatic associations (van Lankveld et al, 2018a) and interpretations (Velten et al, 2019) in women with low levels of sexual desire and low sexual functioning. Given the importance of appraisals for sexual motivation and sexual functioning, and the small number of studies having investigated the relative contribution of associations and interpretations to problems concerning low sexual desire, further studies are needed.…”

“…This indicated that women with HSDD exhibited less positive appraisals of sexual stimuli. To distinguish the affective valence (i.e., how much women like sex) from the motivational value (i.e., how much women want sex) of sexual stimuli, van Lankveld et al ( 2018a ) employed two different STIATs in a sample of women with sexual complaints (including low sexual desire) and healthy controls. The STIATs were used to assess whether women with sexual complaints automatically associated pictures displaying sexual intercourse with either the categories positive/negative (STIAT-liking; representing affective valence) or with the categories I want/I do not want (STIAT-wanting; representing motivational value).…”

“…Although this study did not directly implicate the role of wanting in low sexual desire, the author concluded that focusing on specific components of sexual appraisals (e.g., liking or wanting) and taking contextual factors such as mood into consideration may be useful to advance knowledge on sexual dysfunctions (Dewitte, 2015 ). Concerning the methodological details of sexuality-related STIATs, studies often used sexual pictures (Borg et al, 2010 ; van Lankveld et al, 2018a , b ) or words (e.g., intercourse, orgasm) as erotic targets. As many studies have excluded non-heterosexual participants, however, it is unclear whether the use of heteronormative stimuli influences reaction times of female participants with different sexual orientations.…”

“…To sum up, research on the STIAT-wanting suggests that automatic appraisals concerning the motivational value of sex are likely to be relevant for low sexual desire concerns in women. Using these motivational categories, women with low desire are expected to show faster categorization times for sexual stimuli paired with a label indicating a lack of incentive-motivation (“I don’t want”) as compared to a label indicating a high motivational pull (“I want”) (Dewitte, 2016 ; van Lankveld et al, 2018a ).…”