RESUMO
Current models propose that inhibited sexual arousal is a key component in maintaining sexual pain in women with Genito-Pelvic Pain/Penetration Disorder. It thus follows that enhancing sexual arousal may be an effective strategy to modulate pain, but this effect has not been successfully demonstrated with women, although it has been successful with men. This study built on previous works and examined if the pain-killing effect of sexual arousal might have been undermined by concurrently-elicited disgust. We tested whether women experience disgust as well as sexual arousal when viewing sex stimuli, and whether disgust has an exacerbating effect on pain. Female participants (N = 164) were randomly distributed to watch a porn, disgust, or neutral train-ride film. A cold pressor test (CPT) was utilized to induce pain at the same time that participants viewed their respective film. Pain was indexed by the duration that participants kept their hand in the cold water, and by self-reported pain intensity at the time they quit the CPT. The results showed no differences in pain across conditions. The sex stimulus elicited substantial disgust as well as sexual arousal, and there was a negative correlation between the two emotions. Disgust was not found to increase pain compared to both the neutral and sex conditions. Thus, the findings provide no support for a pain-modulatory effect of subjective sexual arousal on pain in women. This might, however, be due to the sex stimulus having elicited an ambivalent state between an appetitive and aversive emotion concurrently.
RESUMO
BACKGROUND & OBJECTIVES: Pain can be significantly lessened by sex/orgasm, likely due to the release of endorphins during sex, considered potent analgesics. The evidence suggests that endorphins are also present during sexual arousal (that is, prior to sex/orgasm). It follows then that pain can be modulated during sexual arousal, independent of sex/orgasm, too. Accordingly, sexual arousal induced by erotic slides has been demonstrated to lessen pain in men, but not in women. One explanation could be that for women, the erotic slides were not potent enough to elicit a lasting primed state of sexual arousal by the time pain was induced. Thus, the current study aims to optimize the means of inducing a potent state of sexual arousal and subsequently examine the potentially analgesic influence of sexual arousal on pain in women. As a subsidiary aim, the study also assesses whether the anticipated analgesic effect of sexual arousal would be stronger than that of distraction or generalized (non-sexual) arousal. METHODS: Female participants (N = 151) were randomly distributed across four conditions: sexual arousal, generalized arousal, distraction, neutral. Mild pain was induced using a cold pressor while participants were concurrently exposed to film stimuli (pornographic, exciting, distracting, neutral) to induce the targeted emotional states. A visual analogue scale was utilized to measure the subjective level of pain perceived by the participants. RESULTS: Sexual arousal did not reduce subjective pain. Generalized arousal and distraction did not result in stronger analgesic effects than the neutral condition. CONCLUSION: The present findings do not support the hypothesis that sexual arousal alone modulates subjective pain in women. This might be due to the possibility that genital stimulation and/or orgasm are key in pain reduction, or, that feelings of disgust may inadvertently have been induced by the pornographic stimulus and interfered with sexual arousal in influencing pain.
