Validation of a virtual environment for sexual aversion

Abstract

This study focused on sexual aversion (SA) – namely the experience of fear, disgust, and avoidance when exposed to sexual contexts or cues – and aimed to validate a virtual environment's ability to progressively trigger the typical emotional responses of SA. Thirty-nine participants (16 low-SA and 23 high-SA individuals) were immersed in a virtual room and then successively exposed to six scenarios in which a synthetic character showed erotic behaviors of increasing sexual intensity. Throughout immersion, subjective measures of anxiety and disgust (Subjective Units of Discomfort Scale; SUDS), skin conductance, heart rate, cardiac output, and eye movements were recorded. The changes in SUDS and physiological variables were examined through repeated measures analyses of variance. SUDS scores significantly increased as the levels of exposure progressed among the high-SA participants, who also reported significantly more anxiety and disgust than the low-SA group. Significant large time effects were found for cardiac output and eye fixation (on face, chest, and genitals), but no significant group*time interactions were found for physiological variables. Results show that this virtual environment may be a promising tool for research and practice, and its efficacy as part of a virtual reality exposure-based treatment for SA should be tested.