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Disgust versus Lust: Exploring the Interactions of Disgust and Fear with Sexual Arousal in Women - PubMed

  • ️Thu Jan 01 2015

Disgust versus Lust: Exploring the Interactions of Disgust and Fear with Sexual Arousal in Women

Diana S Fleischman et al. PLoS One. 2015.

Abstract

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 interact. Women (final N=76) were assigned to one of four conditions: rate disgust stimuli then watch a pornographic clip; watch a pornographic clip then rate disgust stimuli; rate fear stimuli then watch a pornographic clip; or watch a pornographic clip then rate fear stimuli. Women's genital sexual arousal was measured with vaginal photoplethysmography and their disgust and fear reactions were measured via self-report. We did not find that baseline disgust propensity predicted sexual arousal in women who were exposed to neutral stimuli before erotic content. In the Erotic-before-Disgust condition we did not find that sexual arousal straightforwardly predicted decreased image disgust ratings. However, we did find some evidence that sexual arousal increased self-reported disgust in women with high trait disgust and sexual arousal decreased self-reported disgust in women with low trait disgust. Women who were exposed to disgusting images before erotic content showed significantly less sexual arousal than women in the control condition or women exposed to fear-inducing images before erotic content. In the Disgust-before-Erotic condition the degree of self-reported disgust was negatively correlated with genital sexual arousal. Hence, in the conflict between the ultimate goals of reproduction and disease avoidance, cues of the presence of pathogens significantly reduce the motivation to engage in mating behaviors that, by their nature, entail a risk of pathogen transmission.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Fig 1
Fig 1. Four conditions were employed, as follows (clockwise from the upper left hand corner).

Disgust affects sexual arousal: Women rated 18 disgust-inducing pictures and then watched an erotic film; Sexual arousal affects disgust: Women watched the erotic film first, then rated 18 disgust-inducing pictures; Sexual arousal affects fear: Women watched the erotic film and then rated 18 fear-inducing pictures; Fear affects sexual arousal: Women rated 18 fear-inducing pictures and then watched the erotic film. The two fear conditions control for the contributions of negative valence, an attribute shared by disgust and fear.

Fig 2
Fig 2. The effects of condition on percent change in VPA.

Disgust-before-Erotic, Control (combining two Control-before-Erotic conditions) and Fear-before-Erotic. Error bars are standard error.

Fig 3
Fig 3. Scatterplot of the correlation for participants in the Disgust-before-Erotic condition between sexual arousal (percentage change in VPA from neutral to erotic stimuli) and the mean of disgust ratings of images.

Each point represents one participant.

Fig 4
Fig 4. Mean ratings of disgust for disgust images (disgust reactivity) in the Disgust-before-Erotic (n = 22) and the Erotic-before-Disgust (n = 21) conditions showing similar image ratings over time.

Error bars indicate +1 or -1 standard deviation.

Fig 5
Fig 5. Scatterplot of participants in the Erotic-before-Disgust condition only.

The participants are divided by a median split of baseline pathogen disgust propensity showing an interaction trend (β(17) = 1.24, p = .08) of baseline pathogen disgust propensity and sexual arousal on ratings of disgust-eliciting stimuli (Y axis).

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Grants and funding

Reimbursement for participants was funded by the American Association of University Women dissertation fellowship. There was no other external funding for this study. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

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