Effects of erotic guided imagery on female sexual arousal and emotional response

The discrepancy between survey findings that women require a romantic context for arousal to erotica and the results of laboratory research which have failed to confirm this effect has led to continued controversy over the role of context in female sexual arousal. Methodological criticisms of laboratory research have focused on the passive nature of cue manipulations utilized to create casual versus committed contexts and failure to validate the effectiveness of context manipulations. The present study investigated the effects of erotic guided imagery on female sexual arousal in committed and casual contexts. Sixty‐five women listened to tapes of erotic guided imagery. Participants imagined either themselves or another woman engaging in a committed or casual sexual relationship. Dependent variables consisted of three measures of subjective sexual arousal and the Differential Emotions Scale. A self‐report measure revealed that subjects clearly differentiated the two contexts. Examination of mean scores on the dependent variables indicated that all subjects were sexually aroused by the guided imagery, experienced moderate interest and enjoyment, and experienced minimal negative emotional responses. Multivariate analysis of variance revealed no significant differences for the main effects of context, person, or the interaction between person and context. The findings reaffirm previous laboratory research indicating that women do not require a committed context as a prerequisite for sexual arousal and positive emotional response to imagined erotic stimuli