Men's, more than women's, sexual responses may include a coordination of several physiological indices in order to build their sexual arousal to relevant targets. Here, for the first time, genital arousal and pupil dilation to sexual stimuli were simultaneously assessed. These measures corresponded more strongly with each other, subjective sexual arousal, and self-reported sexual orientation in...

The authors propose a practice-specificity-based model of arousal for achieving peak performance. The study included 37 healthy male physical education students whom they randomly assigned to a high-arousal (n = 19) or low-arousal group (n = 18). To manipulate participants’ level of arousal, the authors used motivational techniques. They used heart rate and the Sport Competition Anxiety Test (R...

Physiological theories may be important in the development and maintenance of social phobia in youth. A limited literature base indicates that youth with social phobia experience increases in objective physiological arousal during social-evaluative situations and are more aware of such increases compared to nonanxious youth. Recent research suggests that youth with social phobia also evidence h...

Valence and arousal has been found to influence memory performance, both independently and in interaction with each other. In order to conduct studies measuring the effect of valence on memory while controlling for arousal, we aimed to develop a validated list of Swedish words that were all rated medium on arousal, while rated neutral or negative on valence. 131 participants rated 50 words each...

Arousal is an important defense against hypoxia during sleep. Rat pups exhibit progressive arousal impairment (habituation) with multiple hypoxia exposures. The mechanisms are unknown. The medullary raphe (MR) is involved in autonomic functions, including sleep, and receives abundant GABAergic inputs. We hypothesized that inhibiting MR neurons with muscimol, a GABA(A) receptor agonist, or preve...

This study investigated sexual coercion (perpetration and victimisation) in women. Women (N = 151) aged 18–63 years (M 23.34, SD 8.80) completed standardised questionnaires measuring (nonverbal arousal, emotional manipulation deception, exploitation of the intoxicated), personality disorder traits (Borderline Histrionic), love styles (Eros, Ludus, Storge, Pragma, Mania, Agape), rejection sensit...

Some suggest that arousal is the essential element needed to engage the amygdala. However, the role of arousal in the larger emotional memory network may differ depending on the valence (positive, negative) of the to-be-remembered information. The goal of the current study was to determine the influence of arousal-based changes in amygdalar connectivity for positive and negative items. Particip...

Based on analytic techniques that collapse data into a single average value, it has been reported that women lack category specificity and show genital sexual arousal to a large range of sexual stimuli including those that both match and do not match their self-reported sexual interests. These findings may be a methodological artifact of the way in which data are analyzed. This study examined w...

Sexual concerns and problems have drawn increased attention from health care providers and the general public in the last decade, in part due to the publicity surrounding Viagra, approved in 1998. Most research in the area of assessment and treatment of sexual dysfunction has targeted men. A Medline search of the term “sexual dysfunction” retrieves 9000 citations addressing female dysfunction a...

Three experiments supported the idea that alcohol fosters sexual risk-taking in men and women, in part, through its effects on sexual arousal. In Experiment 1, increasing alcohol dosage (target blood alcohol levels of .00, .04, .08%) heightened men's and women's risk-taking intentions. Alcohol's effect was indirect via increased subjective sexual arousal; also, men exhibited greater risk-taking...