Effects of Depressive Symptoms and Experimentally Adopted Schemas on Sexual Arousal and Affect in Sexually Healthy Women

The present study examined the effects of depressive mood symptoms and experimentally adopted sexual schemas on women's sexual arousal and affect. Women's vaginal response, subjective sexual arousal, and affect were measured in response to sexually explicit visual material in a laboratory setting. At baseline on a self-report measure, women with depressive mood symptoms (n = 28) reported significantly lower sexual desire than women with normal mood (n=28), but no significant differences in arousal, orgasm, satisfaction, or pain. Participants were asked to adopt both a positive and negative sexual self-schema prior to viewing erotic stimuli. Women in both mood groups demonstrated significantly greater subjective sexual arousal, vaginal response, and positive affect in the positive schema condition than in the negative schema condition when controlling for anxiety. There were no main effects for mood symptoms. These findings support an information processing conceptualization of sexual arousal and suggest that an acute dose of cognitive sexual schemas can significantly impact subsequent sexual and affective responses. Implications of findings for the assessment and treatment of sexual dysfunction are noted.