subject: Activation And Regulation Of Sexual Response [print this page] Activation And Regulation Of Sexual Response
Processing of Sexual Information
During a series of studies we conducted in the 1990s, we have a tendency to consistently found that girls's genital response and sexual feelings are not strongly correlated, and that have an effect on influences sexual feelings. Alternative studies had similar findings. In men, correlations between genital response and sexual feelings are typically significantly positive, suggesting that for men's sexual feelings awareness of their genital response is the most vital source.
A shocking finding from our studies was the benefit with that healthy ladies become genitally aroused in response to erotic film stimuli. When watching an erotic film depicting express sexual activity, most ladies respond with increased vaginal vasocongestion. This increase occurs at intervals seconds after the onset of the stimulus, that suggests a relatively automatized response mechanism for that acutely aware cognitive processes are not necessary. Even when these specific sexual stimuli are negatively evaluated, or induce very little or no feelings of sexual arousal, genital responses are elicited. Genital arousal intensity was found to covary consistently with stimulus explicitness, outlined as the extent to that sexual organs and sexual behaviors are exposed. This automatized response occurs not solely in young girls while not sexual problems, but also in girls with a testosterone deficiency, in postmenopausal ladies, and in women with sexual arousal disorder. Such responses also are found throughout unconsensual sexual activity.
Such a highly automatized mechanism is adaptive from a strictly evolutionary perspective. If genital responding to sexual stimuli didn't occur, our species would not survive. For women, an increase in vasocongestion produces vaginal lubrication, that obviously facilitates sexual interaction. One might be tempted to assume that, for adaptive reasons, the express visual sexual stimuli utilized in our studies represent a class of unlearned stimuli, to which we are innately prepared to respond. These stimuli appear to override the results of varied attempts at voluntary control.
Emotional stimuli can evoke emotional responses without the involvement of aware cognitive processes. As an example, subliminal presentation of slides with phobic objects leads to worry responses in phobic subjects. Before stimuli are consciously recognized and processed, they're evaluated, for instance as being sensible or bad, enticing or dangereous. Per O'hman, the evolutionary relevance of stimuli is the foremost vital necessity for such a fast, preattentive analysis. Perhaps sexual stimuli fall among this class and can they be unconsciously evaluated and processed. A variety of experiments in that sexual stimuli were presented subliminally to male subjects showed that this is often indeed possible. Preattentive processing of sexual stimuli occurs in women as well, but seems to be dependent upon the sort of prime. Specific sexual primes don't lead to priming-effects, but romantic sexual primes do. This appears to contradict Ohman's notion that evolutionary relevant primes can be unconsciously processed. Likely, preattentive processing isn't entirely governed by evolution, but partly the results of overlearning or conditioning.
A requirement of automatic processing looks to be that sexual meaning resulting from visual sexual stimuli is easily accessible in memory. On the premise of a series of priming experiments Janssen presented an data processing model of sexual response. Two information processing pathways are distinguished. The first pathway is regarding appraisal of sexual stimuli and response generation. This pathway is believed to depend largely on automatic or unconscious processes. The second pathway concerns attention and regulation. In this model, sexual arousal is assumed to start with the activation of sexual meanings that are stored in specific memory. Sexual stimuli might elicit different memory traces depending upon the topic's prior experience. This in turn activates physiological responses. It directs attention to the stimulus and ensures that attention remains targeted on the sexual that means of the stimulus. This harmonic cooperation between the automated pathway and attentional processes eventually ends up in genital responses and sexual feelings. Disagreement between sexual response elements would occur, according to the current model, when the sexual stimulus elicits sexual meanings however also nonsexual, and additional specifically, negative emotional meanings. The sexual meanings activate genital response, however the balancing of sexual and nonsexual meanings determine to what extent sexual feelings are experienced.
The fact that disagreement between genital and subjective sexual arousal occurs additional often in ladies might suggest that for ladies sexual stimuli have, more typically than for men, sexual however conjointly nonsexual or even negative meanings. There is some proof that sexual stimuli generate negative sexual meanings in ladies more usually than in men. Sexual stimuli evoke largely positive sexual emotions in men, however a host of alternative nonsexual meanings, both positive and negative, in women.
