The effect of sexual auditory stimuli on physiological arousal and response inhibition in women

Abstract

The aim of current study was twofold. The first aim was to validate a new paradigm in which auditory fragments were presented could enhance sexual arousal in women. Arousal was measured by changes in pupil size. The second aim of this study was to examine if sexual arousal leads to a decrease in response inhibition. It was hypothesized that participants confronted with sexual auditory stimuli would have a higher state of sexual arousal and thus a bigger increase in pupil dilation compared to participants confronted with neutral auditory stimuli. Furthermore, it was hypothesized that a decrease in response inhibition would occur when participants became sexually aroused. A total of 34 female participants enrolled in a 2 within (performance: before and after audio fragments) x 2 between (content: sexual or neutral audio fragments) design. Participants performed an inhibition task, listened to auditory sentences and performed the inhibition task a second time. Results show that pupil size was significantly bigger in both conditions when presented with auditory stimuli. Unexpectedly, no significant differences were found in pupil size during the sex condition as compared to the neutral condition. In addition, there was no significant difference in performance on the inhibition task between the sexual and neutral condition. Although there were no significant differences found in the objective measurements of arousal, subjective measurements showed that participants in the sexual condition did feel more aroused after hearing the voices and rated the voices as more attractive than in the neutral condition. This shows that the use of auditory stimuli could be a useful way to examine arousal with a few alterations to the stimuli and a larger sample size.