Hindrances to sexual arousal: exploring the interplay between sexual arousal, pain, and disgust

The studies within this dissertation aimed to improve our understanding of the mechanisms underlying the persistence of sexual pain, with the ultimate goal of informing therapeutic interventions. Based on established general and sexual pain models describing similar processes of how motivational states can perpetuate or reduce the cycle of pain, I experimentally investigated the modulation of non-genital pain. In Part One, I tested in three back-to-back experiments whether increasing feelings of sexual arousal might be an effective way of reducing pain. The evidence here suggests that feelings of sexual arousal alone do not reduce pain in women, perhaps because the visual stimuli used to elicit sexual arousal had also elicited some level of disgust. In Part Two, I tested within two parallel conditioning studies the hypothesis that instruction-acquired pain and disgust expectations can have an inhibitory influence on sexual arousal. The instruction-acquired disgust expectations in particular indeed reduced feelings of sexual arousal. This indicates that disgust associations may pose a risk for sexual symptoms through weakening sexual arousal. As a concluding step, Part Three was designed to assess whether there are strong associations between having experienced sexual assault and subsequent sexual pain symptoms, or other sexual dysfunctions. This study, currently in progress, utilizes a large German population-representative sample to assess these links.

Dissertation: https://hdl.handle.net/11370/0019328b-cf48-4cc3-b9d0-bb415e27561d