2. The Effects of Sociosexual Orientation, Gender and Relationship Context Cues in Audio Narratives on Heterosexual Men's Genital and Subjective Sexual Response.

Abstract

Past research suggests that heterosexual men show a category-specific pattern of sexual arousal, showing greater arousal to stimuli depicting women than those depicting men.Gender is not, however, the only factor affecting sexual arousal in men. Research has shown that men regard relationship context as an important factor in sexual arousal.Additionally, men show greater sexual arousal to novel than to familiar sexual stimuli. Sociosexuality, the preference for committed or uncommitted sexual relationships,affects behaviour and partner preferences. The current study investigates the relationship between sociosexuality, gender cues, relationship context cues, and sexual arousal in menby assessing 25 heterosexual men’s genital and subjective sexual arousal to 18 audio narratives describing sexual or neutral encounters with female and male strangers,friends, or long-term relationship partners. I expect that heterosexual men will show greater subjective and genital arousal in response to stimuli depicting a sexual encounter with a woman than to stimuli depicting a sexual encounter with a man, replicating previous research. I hypothesize that there will be an interaction between gender cues and relationship context, such that men will show greater sexual arousal to stimuli depicting novel female sexual partners (strangers and friends) than to stimuli depicting familiar female sexual partners (long-term partners). I predict that higher sociosexuality scores, indicating a greater preference for uncommitted sexual relationships, will correlate with greater sexual arousal to uncommitted relationship contexts (strangers or friends), whereas lower sociosexuality scores, will correspond with greater sexual arousal to the committed relationship context (long-term partner).