The Experience of Sexual Emotions

The Experience of Sexual Emotions, Walter Everaerd, University of Amsterdam

The experience of sexual desire and pleasure is conscious by dint of definition. To understand how the brian put togethers these feelings, I proposed a working memory pattern that allows the specification of contributions from (a) external or imagined stimuli, (b) physiological sexual arousal, and (c) explicit autobiographical memories. The integration of sources that inform experience may be facilitated through the insula, an area in the cerebral cortex, before the information becomes available as an experience to consciousness. To demonstrate the heuristic value of the working memory original I discuss two studies. The first research demonstrated that sexual arousal may generate negative emotions, although it is normally assumed that sexual arousal has positive valence. In a psychophysiological investigation with women with vaginismus, we used defensive reflexe to proof whether exposure to sexual stimuli, as compared to threatening stimuli, ensueed in defensive muscular reactions. A small number of women with autobiographical memories of sexual abuse showed a different result and the defensive reactions to sexual stimuli were more intense than to the threat stimuli. These women also reported more feelings of threat to the sexual, as compared to the threat, stimuli. Sexual stimuli may be subservient to as retrieval cues for negative emotional memories and eventually determine the negative experience. The next to the first study demonstrated gender differences in the generation of sexual desire or appetite, or the determination to act upon sexual arousal. In this psychophysio-logical investigation an Achilles tendon (T) introspective measure was used to application of mind the action tendency that arises from the induction of sexual arousal. In a randomized controll trial, we investigated the issues of a single dose of levodopa upon T-reflex amplitude in sexually aroused men and women We ground an effect in men and not in women which supports the view that dopamine is involved in appetitive sexual behavior in men I close that the heuristic value of information processing prototypes of sexual experience deserves more attention from sex researchers.

COPYRIGHT 2006 Society for the Scientific research of Sexuality, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2006 Gale Group