Sexual Sensation Seeking Research Articles

Predictors of university men's number of sexual partners

We examined the role of personality (e.g., hypermasculinity, sensation seeking) and physical individual differences (testosterone, physical attractiveness) in predicting university men's (N = 215) number of sexual partners. Significant zero‐order correlations occurred between number of sexual partners and sensation seeking, hypermasculinity, physical attractiveness, and testosterone. In addition, multiple regression analysis revealed significant increases in prediction with an additive combination of these individual differences, and some of these individual differences (e.g., sensation seeking) contributed unique variation to the prediction of the number of sexual partners. Finally, principal components analysis revealed a common personality factor labeled Disinhibition that may partly underlie the relationship between some of these individual differences and the number of sexual partners. The results are discussed in relation to recent personality research and recent evolutionary theories of human sexua...

Sexual sensation seeking: scale development and predicting AIDS-risk behavior among homosexually active men.

Sensation seeking, the propensity to prefer exciting, optimal, and novel stimulation or arousal, is a potential mediating factor in sexual risk for human immunodeficiency virus infection (HIV), the cause of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). However, the most widely used measure of sensation seeking, the Sensation Seeking Scale (Zuckerman, Kolin, Price, & Zoob, 1964), contains numerous culturally outdated items and items that do not pertain to sexual behavior. In this study, 106 homosexually active men completed newly developed measures of sensation seeking related to sexual and nonsexual experiences, as well as a measure of sexual compulsivity. Results show that the new scales were internally consistent and time-stable. Additional analyses demonstrated convergent, divergent, and discriminant validity for these scales, showing them to be of use as mediating variables in models of high-risk sexual behavior. Implications for HIV prevention and behavior change are discussed.

Love and Sexual Attitudes, Self-Disclosure and Sensation Seeking

Love and sexuality are phenomena of central importance to certain types of intimate relationships. Although love has been a mainstream relationship variable in research, sexuality has often been explored only peripherally within a relationship context. Based on previous findings and using newly developed measures of love attitudes, sexual attitudes and self-disclosure, the present study explored the relation between love and sexuality and their mutual relations with self-disclosure and sensation seeking. Results (n = 218) indicated substantial correlations between love and sex attitudes, and between those variables and self-disclosure to a lover and to a friend, the ability to elicit self-disclosure, and sensation seeking. Males differed from females on only seven of 114 correlations, suggesting gender similarity in the pattern of variable relations. Such correlational evidence is helpful in interpreting mean differences between the sexes for several variables in this study and in previous research. This study shows that a multiplex of attitudes about love interlocks with attitudes about sexuality, and that both relate to other variables such as disclosure and sensation seeking. Such results begin the task of developing the characterizations of the love styles (Lee, 1973) and generalizing love-sex linkages towards the broader context of personality on the one hand, and the complex arena of personal relationships on the other.