How women perceive the causes of their sexual problems influences their subjective well-being, according to new research.
The study, published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, found that women who saw themselves or their partners as the cause of sexual problems tended to have a lower well-being. In contrast, women who saw the problems as specifically sexual tended to report higher well-being.
The findings suggest that how women think about and interpret sexual dysfunction influences their level of distress.
PsyPost interviewed Kyle Stephenson of Willamette University about his study. Read his explanations below:
PsyPost Why were you interested in this topic?
Stephenson: My research and my clinical work focus on how people interpret the world around them, and how these interpretations shape their emotions and behaviors. Many of our most powerful psychotherapies focus on these cognitive interpretations, including cognitive therapies for sexual dysfunction. The more we know about overly generalized or rigid thought processes that cause emotional distress and maintain maladaptive coping methods, the more targeted and efficient our treatments can be.
Unfortunately, although sexual dysfunction is very common and very distressing, it’s difficult to conduct high-quality research because of common discomfort and limited funding from governmental agencies. As a result, we still don’t know all that much about which specific ways of thinking cognitive therapists should target first in treatment. So, this study was an attempt to understand whether there were “typical” ways in which women with sexual dysfunction interpreted the causes of these problems (called “causal attributions”).
We wanted to identify these patterns of beliefs, then test how strongly they were associated with different aspects of well-being (e.g., relationship satisfaction, subjective emotional distress regarding sex, etc.). Finally, we wanted to determine whether these links between thinking patterns and well-being were independent of the actual level of impairment women reported.
What should the average person take away from your study?
I would say the major take home points are: 1. Although there are certainly individual differences, there do seem to be common ways in which women perceive the causes of their sexual problems. Some of these patterns center around who is at fault (me or my partner?), and some focus on whether the sexual difficulty does or does not signify broader problems in the relationship. 2. These patterns of beliefs were moderately associated with well-being (explaining 14-33% of the variance in well-being). 3. These associations were independent of severity of sexual impairment. In other words, holding impairment in sexual desire/arousal/orgasm/etc. constant, these beliefs helped explain why some women were more distressed than others.
Are there any major caveats? What questions still need to be addressed?
Yes, definitely. First, all of our measures were self-report, which comes with some potential biases. Second, the methodology of the study was correlational, so we can’t reach a confident conclusion whether beliefs cause distress, distress causes beliefs, or some third variable causes both. Ideally, future studies will directly manipulate problematic beliefs, then measure whether this change causes an improvement in well-being.
Is there anything else you would like to add?
I’d like to encourage those interested in this area to dive into the literature. You can certainly start with my lab website (https://krstephenson.wixsite.com/stephensonlab), but there’s so much fascinating work being done throughout the field of sexuality! Because it has been taboo for so long, there are many opportunities for new researchers to make their mark by finding something completely new and exciting.
The study, “Heterosexual Women’s Causal Attributions Regarding Impairment in Sexual Function: Factor Structure and Associations with Well-Being“, was also co-authored by Cindy M. Meston.
