Identification with Stimuli Moderates Women's Affective and Testosterone Responses to Self Chosen Erotica
AbstractSexual thoughts are sufficient to increase testosterone (T) in women, yet erotic films are not. A key confound in past studies is autonomy in stimulus selection: women choose the content of their sexual thoughts but films have been selected by researchers. We hypothesized that self chosen erotic films, compared to researcher chosen erotic films, would (1) increase women's self reported arousal, enjoyment, and identification with stimuli, and decrease negative affect; and (2) increase T. Participants (N 116 women) were randomly assigned to a neutral documentary condition or one of three erotic film conditions: high choice (self chosen erotica from participants' own sources) moderate choice (self chosen erotica from films preselected by sexuality researchers) or no choice (researcher chosen erotica) Participants provided saliva samples for T before and after viewing the film in the privacy of their homes. Compared to researcher chosen erotica, self chosen erotica increased self reported arousal and enjoyment, but also unexpectedly disgust, guilt, and embarrassment. Self chosen erotica only marginally increased identification with stimuli compared to researcher chosen erotica. Overall, film condition did not affect T, but individual differences in identification moderated T responses: among women reporting lower levels of identification, the moderate choice condition decreased T compared to the no choice condition, but this difference was not observed among women with higher identification. These results highlight the importance of cognitive/emotional factors like identification for sexually modulated T. However, self chosen erotica results in more ambivalent rather than unequivocally positive cognitive/emotional responses, perhaps because stigma associated with viewing erotica for women becomes more salient when choosing stimuli.
Archives of sexual behavior