No Evidence of Emotion Dysregulation in “Hypersexuals” Reporting Their Emotions to a Sexual Film

Abstract

People who report distress due to their frequent use of visual sexual stimuli (VSS) may experience primarily negative affect, primarily positive affect, or coactivation of positive and negative affect when consuming VSS. Theories of sexual addiction suggest that these individuals regulate their emotions poorly, as evidenced by coactivation of positive and negative emotions during sexual stimulation. Men and women who either reported problems down-regulating their use of VSS (VSS-P, N = 71) or no problem regulating use of VSS (VSS-C, N = 49) watched a neutral film and a sexual film. They reported their positive and negative feelings after each film. Unexpectedly, the VSS-P group exhibited significantly less coactivation of positive and negative affect to the sexual film than VSS-C. This is inconsistent with emotion dysregulation, supposedly a key feature of “hypersexual disorder.” Affect regulation could be failing at a different stage of sexual stimulus processing not studied. Theories about hypersexuality could be more specific regarding when and how affect dysregulation is thought to occur to allow in hypersexuality to allow testing.

Notes

1. Items in the Emotion Rating scale Positive: Sexual arousal (mean of sexual arousal, physical sexual arousal, mental sexual arousal), pleasant, excited, loving, relaxed; Negative: anxious, angry, disgusted, embarrassed, guilty, angry, inhibited, incompetent, bored, distracted; Not analyzed due to similarity with already included ratings: sexual desire, desire for sex without a condom, desire to be close to someone, genital pulsing or throbbing, warmth in genitals, penile erection (men), desire to masturbate, attracted, sexy, sexually attractive, easy to arouse, sexually turned off, desire to have sex; Not analyzed due to lacking clear valence in this context: any physical reaction at all, any genital feeling, feeling of warmth, perspiration, faster heart beat, faster breathing, interested, dirty, aggressive, focused, feminine, masculine.

2. The analysis was rerun including only those who responded with ratings > 1 for each emotion in the correlation pairs. While the difference was no longer significant, as might be expected from the loss of statistical power, the pattern of VSS-C showing more coactivation than VSS-P remained (r = .10 and .04, respectively).