Development and validation of a measure of sexual motivation

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Oliver Schultheiss
• Subject Area: Personality Psychology, Clinical and Medical Psychology, Methodology ; General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: from 2018 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 392853031

The main goal of this project is the development and validation of a set of measures for the assessment of sexual motivation. The measurement approach employed is rooted in incentive-theory accounts of sexual motivation that emphasize the potency of sexual incentives for activating a central motive state aimed at obtaining sexual satisfaction. It is based on a concept of validity that requires evidence for a causal effect of an attribute on its measure and successful applications of this principle in motivation science based on the analysis of imaginative picture stories. The specific objectives of the project are: (1) Development of picture-story measures of the need for sex (nSex) based on content-coding and automated text analysis; (2) development of a suitable picture set for eliciting stories; (3) determination of the reliability (inter-coder, retest, picture/response profile) of the nSex measures; (4) testing the predictive validity of the nSex measures for core phenomena of motivation (attention, affect, psychophysiology and hormones, associative learning, instrumental learning/behavior, frequency of sexual activity in daily life and its association with emotional well-being); (5) examining its convergent and discriminant validity. Findings from a pilot experiment (Study 1) show that priming with erotic stimuli leads to distinct changes in motivational imagery expressed in picture stories. In a first phase of the project, three experimental arousal procedures - priming, movies, and audio recordings - will be used for the arousal of approach and avoidance aspects of sexual motivation (Studies 2-6). Its effects on story content, objective and subjective measures of affect, and measures of physiology will be examined. After identifying imagery and marker words that emerge consistently across all studies, the resulting content-coding and text analysis tools will be used in the second phase of the project, which uses picture-story nSex measures to assess dispositional aspects of sexual motivation. Study 7 will use eye tracking to examine the association between nSex and attentional orienting to erotic stimuli. Study 8 will examine the role of nSex in the forming of associations between neutral stimuli and erotic stimuli. Study 9 looks at the role of nSex in behavioral preferences for erotic stimuli and implicit learning of stimulus-response sequences differentially reinforced by erotic stimuli. Study 10 is a field study with a longitudinal design (1 month) in which participants are administered the picture-story nSex measures twice (women: once in follicular, once in luteal phase), provide three saliva samples for the assessment of gonadal steroids, and report every two days on their emotional well-being and sexual activity. Convergent and discriminant validity of the new nSex measures will be determined via comparison to self-report measures of sexual motivation, measures of personality traits, and content-coding measures of other motives.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants