The influence of sexual arousal on subjective pain intensity during a cold pressor test in women

DOI

Background & Objectives: Pain can be significantly lessened by sex/orgasm, likely due to the release of endorphins during sex, considered potent analgesics. The evidence suggests that endorphins are also present during sexual arousal (that is, prior to sex/orgasm). It follows then that pain can be modulated during sexual arousal, independent of sex/orgasm, too. Accordingly, sexual arousal induced by erotic slides has been demonstrated to lessen pain in men, but not in women. One explanation could be that for women, the erotic slides were not potent enough to elicit a lasting primed state of sexual arousal by the time pain was induced. Thus, the current study aims to optimize the means of inducing a potent state of sexual arousal and subsequently examine the potentially analgesic influence of sexual arousal on pain in women. As a subsidiary aim, the study also assesses whether the anticipated analgesic effect of sexual arousal would be stronger than that of distraction or generalized (non-sexual) arousal. Methods: Female participants ( N = 151) were randomly distributed across four conditions: sexual arousal, generalized arousal, distraction, neutral. Mild pain was induced using a cold pressor while participants were concurrently exposed to film stimuli (pornographic, exciting, distracting, neutral) to induce the targeted emotional states. A visual analogue scale was utilized to measure the subjective level of pain perceived by the participants. Results: Sexual arousal did not reduce subjective pain. Generalized arousal and distraction did not result in stronger analgesic effects than the neutral condition. Conclusion: The present findings do not support the hypothesis that sexual arousal alone modulates subjective pain in women. This might be due to the possibility that genital stimulation and/or orgasm are key in pain reduction, or, that feelings of disgust may inadvertently have been induced by the pornographic stimulus and interfered with sexual arousal in influencing pain.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.34894/BRZT3O
Metadata Access https://dataverse.nl/oai?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_datacite&identifier=doi:10.34894/BRZT3O
Provenance
Creator Lakhsassi, Lara ORCID logo; Borg, Charmaine ORCID logo; Martusewicz, Sophie; van der Ploeg, Karen; de Jong, Peter J. ORCID logo
Publisher DataverseNL
Contributor Digital Competence Centre
Publication Year 2022
Rights CC0 1.0; info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess; http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0
OpenAccess true
Contact Digital Competence Centre (University of Groningen)
Representation
Resource Type Dataset
Format application/x-spss-sav; application/octet-stream; application/x-spss-syntax
Size 1161; 3361; 2817; 4853; 115140; 10424; 6064; 5800; 5496; 5760; 5968; 2864; 2511
Version 1.0
Discipline Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Aquaculture; Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Aquaculture and Veterinary Medicine; Life Sciences; Social Sciences; Social and Behavioural Sciences; Soil Sciences