Why men can't control arousal

Why men can't control arousal

It comes down to ability to regulate emotional response, study finds

By Sally Law
updated 12:58 p.m. ET Oct. 22, 2009

Is sex a state of mind? A recent study from the University of British
Columbia finds that while most men can regulate their physical and
mental sexual arousal to some degree, the men most able to do so are
able to control their other emotions as well.

“We suspect that if an individual is good at regulating one type of
emotional response, he/she is probably good at regulating other
emotional responses,” says Jason Winters, the study’s research head.
“This has never been shown before.”

The study employed 16 randomly ordered video clips. Eight were erotic,
and eight were funny (specifically, the funny video clips featured the
least sexy comedian the researchers could find: Mitch Hedberg).
Participants were instructed to control their response to certain
videos, and simply to watch the others. They then rated their arousal
following each clip, and were hooked up to machines that measured
their erections.

Researchers wanted to know: Could men control sexual arousal, fooling
both themselves and others?

“I’m trained in forensic psychology, and the original plan was to do
this study with sexual offenders,” Winters tells LiveScience.
“However, I needed to first establish that there is range of sexual
arousal regulation abilities in the general male population.”

Indeed, participants were, on average, able to regulate their
physiological sexual arousal when told to do so; in fact, they showed
a 25 percent reduction in erectile response. “This is consistent with
success rates from previous, well-controlled [measuring-device] faking
studies in which success rates range from 26 to 38 percent,” Winters
writes in his study.

The range of regulation abilities had nothing to do with age, sexual
experience, or sexual compulsivity. However, sexual excitation,
inhibition, and desire were related to regulation success: Men who
were more easily excited were, unsurprisingly, less able to regulate;
guys who tended to be sexually inhibited because of performance issues
were better able to stave off an erection.

Furthermore, the study found that the men who were best able to
control their response to the pornographic videos were also able to
control their response to Mitch Hedberg. But for those who had
difficulty regulating, reverse psychology could be to blame.

“The finding that was most surprising was that some men became more
sexually aroused when they tried to regulate their sexual arousal,”
Winters says. “In other words, they responded more strongly (both
physiologically and self-reported) during trials in which they
attempted to regulate their arousal than trials during which they
merely watched the stimuli. We attributed this increased response to
anxiety — in this case, demand anxiety. It’s sort of like when you
tell someone not to think of a white elephant; those [who] are most
anxious during the task have the most trouble not thinking about the
white elephant.”

The study’s findings could have significant implications.

“The next step is to do a similar study with sexual offenders,”
Winters says. “I suspect that sexual offenders will generally be very
poor regulators, and that poor regulation is one of the factors that
contributes to their offending.”

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33431954/ns/health-mens_health/
http://www.livescience.com/health/091022-arousal-regulation.html

Conscious Regulation of Sexual Arousal in Men
www.christofflab.ca/pdfs/Winters_Christoff_Gorzalka_2009.pdf

WM
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