Summary:
It has been proposed that acute pain can be generally reduced by eliciting sexual arousal. Increasing subjective sexual arousal may thus help reduce pain during sex. Yet, in conflict with the view that subjective sexual arousal would generally reduce pain, previous research has failed to find that presenting a sexually arousing film stimulus attenuates pain during a cold pressor test (CPT) in women. This might be due to the sexually arousing film having also elicited disgust. Therefore, this study tested whether subjective sexual arousal could generally reduce pain, provided that concurrently-elicited disgust is minimized.
Method:
Healthy female undergraduates (i.e., no sexual dysfunction) were randomly distributed through a digital list randomizer to either watch a porn film that can elicit similar levels of disgust and sexual arousal, a porn film that elicits greater subjective sexual arousal than disgust, or a neutral train ride film (N = 174). A CPT was utilized for pain induction while simultaneously viewing the assigned films. Pain was indexed by subjective ratings of pain intensity, and CPT duration.
This is the dataset & output/syntax used for analyses of the manuscript titled 'Does porn-induced heightened subjective sexual arousal lower pain in women if concurrently elicited disgust is minimized?'
SPSS, 28