Attention and Emotional Responses to Sexual Stimuli and Their Relationship to Sexual Desire
Attention and Emotional Responses to Sexual Stimuli and Their Relationship to Sexual Desire
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DOI:
10.1007/s10508-007-9236-6
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发表时间:
2008
影响因子:
3.8
通讯作者:
N. Prause;E. Janssen;W. Hetrick
中科院分区:
文献类型:
--
作者:
N. Prause;E. Janssen;W. Hetrick
Little is known about why individuals vary in their levels of sexual desire. Information processing models, like Barlow’s (Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology54:140–148, 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 wereslowerto detect targets in the dot detection task that replaced sexual images butdid not differin 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.