Latencies of Restricted Associations to Double-Entendre Sexual Words as a Function of Personality Variables

Abstract

Sexually avoidant and non-avoidant subjects as defined by the personality constructs of sex-guilt, social desirability, and repression-sensitization were required to give both sexual and asexual responses to the same set of sexual double-entendre words. With the exception of the repression-sensitization variable, the results were generally in the direction predicted from a stimulus-encoding analysis of the way in which subjects process sexual double-entendre words. In general, sexually avoidant subjects showed longer latencies than non-avoidant subjects when giving sexual responses but not on asexual responses. Likewise, sexual response latencies were significantly longer than asexual response latencies for sex-avoidant but not for sexually non-avoidant subjects. Sexual responses were also uniformly associated with longer latencies than asexual responses.