The relationship between sexual arousal and sensory perception has been a topic largely neglected within the realm of human sexuality research. The present study assessed the influence of sexual arousal on genital and non-genital sensation in women. It also examined the theory that painful intercourse is associated with insufficient sexual arousal. A total of 20 healthy women and 20 women with ...

Sexual concordance is defined as the association between genital response and self-reported sexual arousal. Though one might predict a strong association between sexual concordance and awareness of other internal physiological sensations (termed interoception), past research on sexually healthy women has not found these different domains to be related. The aim of the present study was to test t...

The assessment of sexual arousal in men and women informs theoretical studies of human sexuality and provides a method to assess and evaluate the treatment of sexual dysfunctions and paraphilias. Understanding measures of arousal is, therefore, paramount to further theoretical and practical advances in the study of human sexuality. In this meta-analysis, we review research to quantify the exten...

BACKGROUND Sex and disgust are basic, evolutionary relevant functions that are often construed as paradoxical. In general the stimuli involved in sexual encounters are, at least out of context strongly perceived to hold high disgust qualities. Saliva, sweat, semen and body odours are among the strongest disgust elicitors. This results in the intriguing question of how people succeed in having p...

This study aimed to clarify the role of positive, negative, and ambivalent (i.e., co-occurring positive and negative) affect in predicting subjective sexual arousal, sexual desire, and genital response. A total of 26 women and 19 men observed three erotic film excerpts and a film excerpt depicting a coercive sexual encounter. Genital responses were recorded throughout the study, and participant...

OBJECTIVE A virtual reality environment (VRE) was designed to expose participants to substance use and sexual risk-taking cues to examine the utility of VR in eliciting adolescent physiological arousal. METHODS 42 adolescents (55% male) with a mean age of 14.54 years (SD = 1.13) participated. Physiological arousal was examined through heart rate (HR), respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), and s...

Female sexual arousal disorders constitute a varied spectrum of difficulties, ranging from the total absence of genital or subjective pleasurable arousal to feelings of persistent genital arousal in the absence of sexual desire. Arousal disorders can be associated with physical factors (eg, vaginal dryness) or psychological factors (eg, anxiety, distraction), or a combination of both. The most ...

Introduction. There are problems with the existing definition of hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD) in that desire for sex and sexual fantasy are not a universal experience. Aims. To explore: (i) women’s motivations to engage in sexual activity; (ii) frequency and predictors of sexual fantasies; (iii) sexual arousal; (iv) recognition of sexual arousal; and (v) association between relation...

Sexual arousal is a motivational state that moves humans toward situations that inherently pose a risk of disease transmission. Disgust is an emotion that adaptively moves humans away from such situations. Incongruent is the fact that sexual activity is elementary to human fitness yet involves strong disgust elicitors. Using an experimental paradigm, we investigated how these two states interac...

Introduction. The impact of self-awareness during sexual activity has been widely discussed. However, research has been largely focused on the effects of performance anxiety in male erectile functioning. It has been suggested that physical appearance concerns may have a similar influence on sexual function in women as does men’s self-awareness about erectile function. However, the role that phy...