Stopped cold: Motor-response inhibition reduces the capacity of sexually-explicit stimuli to elicit subjective and physiological sexual arousal

Abstract

The motivational incentive of sexual stimuli can be a salient force in determining the focus of thought and behaviour. Here we show that the simple act of not pressing a key during the perception of sexual content reduces its motivational incentive and subsequent capacity to elicit sexual arousal. Undergraduate participants (N=116) completed a Go/No-go task that required them to inhibit responses to either sexual or non-sexual images. Later they watched sexually explicit videos and reported moment-to-moment changes in self-reported sexual arousal, while thermography was used to record changes in genital physiological arousal. Participants who previously inhibited sexual images experienced lower levels of both self-reported and physiological arousal than those who inhibited non-sexual images. These results extend prior research to suggest that a by-product of motor-response inhibition is a negative alteration of stimulus-value representations for associated items— the kind of value that drives even the most biologically-fundamental forms of motivated behaviour.