Role of Emotion and Attention in Variations in Sexual Desire

Abstract

Little is known about why individuals vary in their levels of sexual desire. Information processing models, like Barlow's 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, 66 participants (33 female) completed a dot detection task, viewing time measure, and evoked response potential (ERP) measures of attention captured by sexual stimuli, and they completed startle eyeblink modulation, retrahens auriculum modulation, stimulus ratings, and electroencephalography power band measures indexing the valence of emotional response to affective stimuli. Participants with high levels of sexual desire were slower to detect targets in the dot detection task that replaced sexual pictures and in the presence of any sexual stimuli and also evinced higher ERP responses to all emotional stimuli. However, sexual desire groups did not differ in their psychophysiological measures of affective modulation nor in their ratings of 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.