The decline and fall of sex

Researchers and clinicians have long argued that cognition is an important component of sexual arousal. We tested the hypothesis that self‐schema activation is one of the cognitive processes involved in sexual arousal to audiovisual stimuli. College students (105 males and females) individually viewed an erotic videotape that contained 20 66‐millisecond presentations of various trait adjectives, which students were asked to read aloud. About half of these students had performed a self‐reference task (i.e., made judgments regarding the self‐descriptiveness of each word) prior to viewing the tape. Among students who had performed the self‐reference task, those reporting relatively high sexual arousal to the film correctly identified more words than students who reported little or no arousal. Among students who did not perform the self‐reference task, arousal had no effect on the number of words identified. This finding was tentatively interpreted as evidence that the self‐schema is activated during sexual arousal.