The Ubiquitous External Ejaculation: Examining Perceptions of Sexual Images Across Cultures.

The persistent debates over pornography have often focused on differences between males and females, not only in the frequency of consumption or the type of material consumed, but also on the different ways that individuals may perceive sexually explicit images and respond to them. Some of these differences may be due to sex differences in a number of factors including sexual strategies, pathogen or sexual disgust, and own mate value as well as within sex differences in these factors. Previous studies have demonstrated that perceptions of sexually explicit images are influenced by the sex of the target in the image and the target's emotional affect, as well as sex of the respondent, their sexual orientation, short-term mating orientation, and disgust measures. However, these previous studies were conducted with participants from the United States alone. This study compared the findings from these US samples to those from non-Western ones (Philippines and Brazil) in order to examine the replicability across cultures of the US results as well as whether some variables (religiosity, for example) account for more or less of the variance in perceptions in different populations. Results indicated that there were some differences in terms of the amount of variance in perceptions explained by different variables across populations. Participant and stimuli related variables explained more variance in the Philippines while individual difference variables accounted for more variance in Brazil.

Is Degradation in the Eye of the Beholder (or the Researcher)?

When people raise concerns about pornography, they most often are focused on whether pornography increases violence toward women and/or whether it degrades women. While a substantial amount of cross-cultural data suggests that there is no direct link between adult consumption and violence, the question of whether pornography is inherently degrading to women lacks clear answers. As does the question of whether behaviors in pornography that are commonly labeled as degrading are perceived that way when they take place outside pornography. To answer this question about the inherent nature of degradation, we need a better definition and understanding of what particular behaviors people consider to be degrading and whether their perception of what is degrading is influenced by the circumstance or the people involved in a non-pornography setting. To examine this, 496 individuals (247 females, 249 males) were asked to indicate their perceptions of various sexual behaviors when engaged in by males and females toward male and female partners. Results suggest that while some particular sexual behaviors are broadly viewed as degrading (e.g., watersports), perceptions of degradation for other behaviors seem to be influenced by who is doing what to whom. In this sense, the perception of degradation exists in the eye of beholder and is often not defined by the particular sexual act. Future studies of degradation should take into account the context as well as the players involved.

Pornography's Ubiquitous External Ejaculation: Predictors of Perceptions.

One of the most contentious topics in the sexual arena is that of pornography. While some researchers focus on the costs and benefits of consumption, others focus on questions surrounding the objectification or degradation of women, with relatively little focus on the men involved, and the appeal of visual sexual stimuli more generally, including what that may tell us about the sexual interests of the consumers. In this study, we focus on what factors influence men's and women's perceptions of sexually explicit images, in particular the ubiquitous external ejaculation. Sex differences in perceptions of the images are examined as well as the influence of the emotional affect of the recipient of the ejaculation, the sexual orientation of the participant (are they looking at an image of their preferred sex or not), and a number of individual difference factors, including religiosity, Dark Triad personality traits, mate value, short-term mating strategy, and disgust sensitivity. Overall, the largest influences on perceptions were the direct effects of target emotional affect and sex, sex of viewer, sexual orientation of viewer, short-term mating orientation, and level of sexual disgust. In addition, substantial variation in perceptions was explained by the interaction between sex, sexual orientation, and target sex. The importance of positive affect in the images as well as the lack of association with psychopathy again suggests that the appeal (or at least the ubiquity of the images in pornographic material) is not rooted in degradation, but in some other aspect of short-term sexual psychology.

Perceptions of Sexual Images: Factors Influencing Responses to the Ubiquitous External Ejaculation.

The debate over pornography has drawn attention to sex differences not only in the frequency of pornography consumption but also in the different ways males and females may perceive sexually explicit images and respond to them. Some of these differences may be due to sex differences in a variety of factors including sexual strategies and disgust, in particular, disgust related to pathogen avoidance. There is a large literature that focuses on how pathogen avoidance has shaped human behavior from political ideology to in-group/outgroup behavior to sexual risk taking/avoidance. This study examined sex differences in perceptions and how they are influenced by the emotional context of the image as well as individual difference factors, including disgust sensitivity, mate value, sociosexuality, and sexual orientation. Participants viewed a series of sexually explicit images of external ejaculations and rated them in terms of being positive, neutral, or negative. The factors accounting for the greatest variance in perceptions were target affect and sex, sexual orientation, and respondent sex, followed by pathogen and sexual disgust, self-perceived mate value, and sociosexual attitudes and desire.

The importance of ecological validity, ultimate causation, and natural categories.

The target article raises important questions about the applicability of experimental social psychology research on topics with policy implications. This commentary focuses on the importance of attending to a variety of factors to improve ecological validity as well as considering the ultimate factors shaping behavior and the role of natural categories in the stability of stereotypes and their influence.

Representational and executive selection resources in 'theory of mind': evidence from compromised belief-desire reasoning in old age.

Effective belief-desire reasoning requires both specialized representational capacities-the capacity to represent the mental states as such-as well as executive selection processes for accurate performance on tasks requiring the prediction and explanation of the actions of social agents. Compromised belief-desire reasoning in a given population may reflect failures in either or both of these systems. We report evidence supporting this two-process model from belief-desire reasoning tasks conducted with younger and older adult populations. When task inferential complexity is held constant, neither group showed specific difficulty with reasoning about mental state content as compared with non-mental state content. However, manipulations that systematically increase executive performance demands within belief-desire reasoning caused systematic decreases in task performance in both older and younger adult groups. Moreover, the effect of increasing executive demands was disproportionately greater in the older group. Regression analysis indicated that measures of processing speed and inhibition contributed most to explaining variance in accuracy and response times in the belief-desire reasoning tasks. These results are consistent with the idea that compromised belief-desire reasoning in old age is likely the result of age-related decline in executive selection skills that supplement core mental state representational abilities, rather than as a result of failures in the representational system itself.

Responses to patronizing communication and factors that attenuate those responses.

The purpose of this study was to investigate younger (n = 52, ages 18-24) and older (n = 69, ages 61-98) adults' responses to patronizing communication in terms of (a) performance on a cognitive task (Weschler Adult Intelligence Scale-III block design) and (b) physiological responses (i.e., change in cortisol levels), as well as factors that may attenuate those responses. Participants were randomly assigned to receive instructions for the task using either a patronizing or nonpatronizing speech style. Participants also completed a measure of attitudes about aging and the quantity/quality of their intergenerational interaction. Older adults (relative to younger adults) were found to be more reactive to the patronizing speech style in terms of their performance on the task as well as the change in their cortisol levels. Older adults who had more positive attitudes about aging as well as more positive intergenerational interactions were protected from the performance deficits as a result of patronizing speech style. These findings could be used to inform social programs aimed at reducing age-based stigma and improving the life course outcomes of our aging population.

"Life stage-specific" variations in performance in response to age stereotypes.

In a test of life stage-specific responses to age-based stigma, older (n = 54, ages 62-92) and younger (n = 81, ages 17-22) adults were told that a task (Weschler Adult Intelligence Scale-III block design) required either (a) speed/contemporary knowledge (YA; "youth advantage") or (b) life experience/wisdom (OA; "age advantage"). In order to investigate the role of individuals' own perceptual biases in response to age-based stigma, participants also completed a measure of perceived personal control of their life outcomes. Older adults showed lower performance on the task as a result of the additive effects of (a) exposure to a negative age-relevant stereotype and (b) being under the perceived control of others. Younger adults, however, showed higher performance on the task as a result of exposure to a negative age-relevant stereotype (a stereotype challenge effect, disconfirming the stereotype)-but only if they saw themselves under the control of powerful others. The opposed responses of the 2 age groups are interpreted as reflecting (a) differences in the permanence of their group membership and (b) uniqueness of age-based stigma. To our knowledge, this is the first test of the effects of age-relevant stereotypes on younger adults.