Gender Differences in the Automatic Attention to Romantic Vs Sexually Explicit Stimuli.

INTRODUCTION: Gender differences in sexual responses and cognitive and emotional processing to romantic and sexually explicit stimuli have been reported. However, these differences seem to depend on the automaticity of the task that is being used, thus suggesting that gender differences may be the result of specific mechanisms rather than a generalized effect.

AIM: To expand previous basic processes research on gender differences to romantic vs sexually explicit stimuli, focusing on potential differentiating mechanisms influencing male and female sexual responses, we aim to investigate gender differences on automatic attention to sexual stimuli, and to test its relationship with sexual excitation proneness.

METHODS: 26 women and 30 men (heterosexual) performed an automatic attention task, in which romantic and sexually explicit stimuli were presented as distractors, that is, stimuli to be ignored, while a concurrent letter discrimination task was performed, followed by a self-report task assessing subjective sexual and emotional responses to the stimuli.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Percentage of accuracy and response times (RTs) to discriminate the target letters were used as markers of automatic attention, with lower accuracy and longer RTs reflecting a higher degree of attentional capture by the distractor stimuli (romantic and sexually explicit). Participants completed self-report ratings on emotional valence, general arousal, and sexual arousal toward romantic and sexually explicit stimuli. They further reported on their sexual excitation proneness.

RESULTS: Findings revealed that sexually explicit pictures yielded more automatic attention capture. However, this effect was superseded by pornography consumption, which likely reflects a habituation mechanism. Also, data revealed gender-x type of picture interaction effects only at the self-report task, with men rating sexually explicit stimuli as more sexually exciting, and women rating these stimuli as less pleasant. No relationship was found between automatic attention proxies and sexual excitation proneness.

CLINICAL TRANSLATION: While therapeutic strategies are used as tools to improve attention to sexual stimuli (and, hence, increase sexual arousal), the current findings suggest that the specific pathways by which attention influences sexual response are still to be established. Also, gender differences on the subjective appraisal of sex stimuli suggest that therapeutic approaches, consisting on exposure techniques, must recognize gender specificities.

STRENGTHS & LIMITATIONS: To our knowledge, this is the first study applying an automatic attention task to the field of sex research, thus adding new inputs to the topic of attention, gender differences, and sexual response. However, there is very limited research in the field of automatic attention, which may limit the interpretation of our findings, at the moment.

CONCLUSION: Whereas both genders do not seem to differ in automatic attention toward romantic and sexually explicit stimuli, their responses do differ in their subjective appraisal of the stimuli. Furthermore, despite theoretical assumptions on the relationship between attention and sexual response, automatic attention seemed not to be related to sexual excitation proneness. Carvalho J, Czop O, Rocha M, et al. Gender differences in the automatic attention to romantic vs sexually explicit stimuli. J Sex Med 2018;15:1083-1092.