Skip to main content
ABCT 2024 58th Annual Convention Main banner
Psychology Tools Ad
Final Program


Icon Legend
This session is not in your schedule.
This session is in your schedule. Click again to remove it.
Presentation Icons
Recorded Session
Recorded Session
Ticketed Session
Ticketed Session
Back

Sexual Functioning

Desire, not disgust, predicts controlled attention to disgust-relevant sexual cues

(PS10-86) Desire, Not Disgust, Predicts Controlled Attention to Disgust-relevant Sexual Cues

Saturday, November 16, 2024
1:00 PM – 2:00 PM EST
Location: Franklin Hall, Level 4, Marriott Downtown
Abstract Text: Sex with a partner involves contact with genitals and bodily fluids, which potentially elicit a disgust response that competes with sexual arousal. Elevated disgust sensitivity has been linked to sexual difficulties in women, including pain, distress, low arousal, and low desire. Disgust elicits avoidance, and during sex, this might disrupt attention to sexual cues, decreasing arousal and causing difficulties. These sexual difficulties may stem from low sexual desire—motivation for sex—rather than elevated disgust sensitivity. The present study sought to clarify the relations between disgust sensitivity, sexual desire, and reactivity to sexual disgust images as revealed by a proxy for visual attention. We used a novel online alternative to eye tracking, MouseView.js, to measure controlled attention to two types of disgusting images (sexual and food) paired with neutral images. Images of spoiled food were included as a control condition because they involve appetitive stimuli with pathogen risk (Tybur et al., 2013), but are unrelated to sexual motivation. In study 1 (N = 100), we found that sexual desire, as measured by the Sexual Desire Inventory (Spector et al., 1996), was a significant predictor of dwell on sexual disgust images (β = .35, p < .001) but disgust sensitivity (β = -.17, p = .08), as measured by the Disgust Scale – Revised (Olatunji et al., 2007), F(2,97) = 8.10, p < .001, R2 = .14 was not, and this pattern was not observed for the food disgust images. Study 2 (N = 200) was a pre-registered replication of study 1 with an additional condition with non-disgusting sexual images. We successfully replicated the results of study 1 and additionally, found that sexual desire (β = .20, p = .005) but not disgust sensitivity (β = .-.02, p = .80), predicted viewing of non-disgusting sexual images, F(2,195) = 4.03, p = .02, R2 = .04. These findings highlight the potential role of low desire in sexual dysfunctions involving disgust as well as the potential for treatments that increase desire to overcome disgust.