An empirical investigation of hypersexuality

Abstract

The aim of this study was to investigate the nature of hypersexuality and the personality factors associated with the desire for and experience of high frequency sexual behavior. Participants in the study were 69 male and 93 female university students. Respondents reported on their desire for and experience of masturbation, oral sex, sexual intercourse, pornography, indecent phone calls or letters, prostitution, exhibitionism, voyeurism, as well as providing self-report measures which evaluated their levels of state and trait anxiety, depression, obsessive and compulsive symptoms and fear of intimacy. The results demonstrated that subjects who engaged in high-frequency voyeurism were more depressed than low-frequency voyeurs. Respondents in the high-frequency sexual deviant desire and behavior groups appeared to have more obsessive-compulsive symptoms in comparison to the low-frequency deviant sexual behavior and desire groups. Increased psychopathology was not associated with high-frequency non-deviant sexual behaviors and desires. This finding raised the question of whether labels such as sexual compulsion and addiction are merely pathologizing illegal sexual behavior.