Voluntary control of male sexual arousal

Abstract

Forty-eight adult male volunteers attempted to suppress sexual arousal while viewing a sexually explicit videotape and generate an arousal response while viewing a neutral videotape. Attendance to the stimuli was assured by requiring subjects to provide an ongoing verbal description of the videotape they were viewing. While significant effects in controlling arousal were obtained, the degree of subject success varied as a function of the criteria used for evaluating outcome. The most conservative analysis, a simultaneous discriminant analysis procedure comparing subjects penile plethysmographic responses across the entire 3 min of each condition, revealed that in no case was a subject able to produce a pattern of sexual response that was misclassified as the condition he was attempting to emulate. Results support the value of requiring attendance to experimental stimuli and of analyzing trends/patterns of arousal across an entire experimental period in identifying attempts to "fake" sexual preferences. Theoretical and clinical implications of these findings are discussed.