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

Abstract

Theoretical models emphasize the role of both automatic appraisals (i.e., associations) and conscious appraisals (i.e., interpretations) for sexual desire. Studies on sexuality-related appraisals have not combined self-report measures and experimental paradigms in order to compare the relevance of associations or interpretations. The aim of this study was to assess the relative contribution of both associations and interpretations to the explanation of low sexual desire in women. Toward this goal, indirect measures assessing associations (via a Single Target Implicit Association Test [STIAT]) and interpretations (via a Scrambled Sentences Test [SST] and a scenario task) were administered in a sample of 263 women (Mage = 27.90, SD 8.27) with varying levels of sexual desire and different sexual orientations (exclusively heterosexual women: 54.6%). Negative sexuality-related interpretations as assessed with two variants of the SST as well as the scenario task added to the explanation of lower sexual desire in women. Negative associations as measured with the STIAT were predictive of lower sexual desire only in women who did not indicate an exclusively heterosexual orientation. In this study, sexuality-related interpretations were more relevant to women’s sexual desire than automatic associations. Future studies should assess the causal mechanism underlying sexuality-related interpretations (e.g., by evaluating whether these can be changed via cognitive bias modification techniques or psychological treatments).

Scrambled but valid? The Scrambled Sentences Task as a Measure of Interpretation Biases in Psychopathology: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

“…The SST has been applied mostly in undiagnosed samples, such as unselected student samples (e.g., Zahler et al, 2021) or samples including individuals with elevated levels of subsyndromal symptoms (e.g., Bradatsch et al, 2020). About a third of the included studies applied the SST in a clinical setting (i.e., formally diagnosed or recruited from healthcare settings), emphasizing the applicability of the SST across different disorder severities.…”

The world dangerous it is—The scrambled sentences task in the context of posttraumatic stress symptoms

“…Performance on the SST has been shown to be associated with symptoms of depression (Lee et al, 2016;O'Connor et al, 2021) and to predict a subsequent diagnosis of major depression (Rude et al, 2010). Recent research has successfully adapted the stimuli used in the SST to other psychopathology contexts such as anorexia nervosa or body dissatisfaction (Bradatsch et al, 2020;Brockmeyer et al, 2018), paranoia (Savulich et al, 2020), anxiety sensitivity (Zahler et al, 2020), symptoms of social anxiety (de Voogd et al, 2017), female sexual dysfunction (Zahler et al, 2021), or generalized anxiety disorder (Krahé et al, 2022). Across all these studies, the SST score was associated with symptoms of the target disorder, supporting the validity of the SST as a measure of dysfunctional interpretational processes in various disorders.…”