New research published in the journal PLOS One reveals that a person’s underlying personality traits are strongly linked to how often they experience sexual fantasies. The findings suggest that individuals with higher levels of negative emotionality fantasize more frequently, while those who are highly agreeable or conscientious tend to have fewer sexual fantasies.
When psychologists attempt to understand why people act the way they do, they often turn to the Big Five personality framework. This theoretical model argues that human personality can be largely described using five broad dimensions. Extraversion captures a person’s sociability and outgoing nature, while agreeableness reflects interpersonal warmth and a desire for social harmony.
Conscientiousness relates to self-discipline and goal-directed behavior. Negative emotionality, which is often referred to as neuroticism, describes a tendency to experience negative moods. Finally, open-mindedness encompasses an individual’s intellectual curiosity and willingness to embrace new experiences.
To achieve even greater precision, psychologists break each of these five broad traits into three smaller components, known as facets. For instance, conscientiousness is composed of organization, productiveness, and responsibility. Negative emotionality includes anxiety, emotional volatility, and depression. Analyzing personality at this granular level helps pinpoint the exact psychological mechanisms driving human behavior.
Despite the basic universality of sexual fantasies, they remain heavily understudied in psychological literature. For decades, clinical frameworks framed these mental experiences as inherently problematic or explicitly linked them to antisocial behaviors, such as aggression or sexual offenses. More recent scientific approaches attempt to study sexual desires in a value-neutral way, acknowledging that most adults experience them and often derive well-being from them.
However, scientists have gathered very little data on how everyday mental imagery connects to standard personality profiles. Most previous investigations only looked at the broad Big Five categories, masking the specific nuances that facet-level data can reveal.
To address this gap, psychologists Emily Cannoot and William J. Chopik from Michigan State University, along with Amy C. Moors from Chapman University and the Kinsey Institute, designed an expansive national survey. They recruited 5,225 adult participants through online polling panels.
The participants ranged in age from 18 to 94 years old, with an average age of about 58. Slightly more than half of the respondents identified as men. Because the survey was embedded within a larger project focused on close relationships, nearly all participants were either married or actively dating someone. They were also relatively active sexually, with more than two thirds indicating they engage in sex at least once a month.
Participants first completed a standardized 30-item personality test. They read statements such as “I am someone who worries a lot” or “I am someone who is persistent, works until the task is finished.” They then rated how accurately each statement described their own disposition on a five-point scale. This allowed the research team to generate scores for both the overarching Big Five traits and their 15 specific facets.
Next, the respondents filled out a comprehensive sexual fantasies questionnaire. This tool presented 40 distinct sexual themes and asked participants to report their frequency of fantasizing about each one. The response options ranged from never having the fantasy to experiencing it daily.
The researchers categorized the 40 themes into four main groupings. Exploratory fantasies involve novel or group experiences, like participating in an orgy. Intimate fantasies center on emotional closeness and romance, such as making love outdoors in a secluded, beautiful setting.
Impersonal fantasies feature scenarios where the participant might act as an observer, such as watching others have sex. Sadomasochistic fantasies involve themes of submission, dominance, or being forced to do something.
When analyzing the data, the researchers first ran straightforward comparisons between personality scores and fantasy frequencies. They subsequently applied a statistical technique to isolate the unique effect of each trait. Since people’s personality features often overlap, and because age and gender influence sexual behavior, this secondary analysis held those overlapping variables constant.
The results revealed that conscientiousness was the most consistent predictor of a person’s sexual mental life. Individuals who scored higher in conscientiousness reported lower frequencies across all four types of sexual fantasies. Agreeableness displayed a very similar pattern, reliably predicting a lower frequency of fantasizing.
A closer look at the facets illuminated exactly why these traits suppress sexual imagination. The negative association for agreeable people was entirely driven by the respectfulness facet, with the compassion and trust facets showing no substantial link. Similarly, for conscientious individuals, the responsibility facet minimized fantasizing, while organization and productiveness played no role.
Highly respectful and responsible people may feel a stronger internal pressure to align with traditional social norms. They might moralize their own behavior and naturally shy away from entertaining unconventional scenarios or themes of consensual aggression.
Conversely, participants with higher levels of negative emotionality fantasized much more frequently. This positive association appeared consistently across the exploratory, intimate, impersonal, and sadomasochistic categories alike.
This finding became much more apparent when the research team looked at the subcomponents of negative emotionality. The emotional volatility and anxiety facets exhibited virtually no relationship with sexual fantasies. The entire effect was generated by the depression facet.
The researchers suspect this points toward an emotional regulation strategy. People with depressive personality features might deliberately or spontaneously lean on sexual fantasies to generate positive mental states. In this view, entertaining exciting or arousing thoughts acts as a psychological buffer against low moods.
Some results contradicted previous psychological assumptions. Past studies suggested that open-minded individuals tend to daydream more frequently in general, leading to an expectation that they would also report more sexual fantasies. In this study, however, open-mindedness and its facet of creative imagination were largely unrelated to the frequency of sexual thoughts. Extraversion and its facets of sociability, energy, and assertiveness also showed minimal relationships with fantasizing once age, gender, and other background variables were controlled.
The authors outlined a few structural limitations to their study. The data relied natively on self-reported surveys. When people are asked about sensitive topics, they sometimes adjust their answers to appear more socially conventional. The anonymous setting of the survey likely mitigated some of this bias, but self-reports can never entirely eliminate it.
The study also relied on a cross-sectional design, which captures people at only one single point in time. This methodology cannot track stability or change. A person’s personality traits and sexual interests might fluctuate together over the years as their life circumstances shift.
Additionally, the participant pool skewed heavily white, and nearly all respondents were in monogamous romantic relationships. Future studies will need to recruit more diverse samples, including single individuals and those practicing consensual non-monogamy, to see if these patterns hold across different populations.
Understanding the natural variation in sexual imagination provides a helpful framework for both researchers and clinicians. Expanding the focus beyond broad personality traits to specific facets offers a much higher resolution map of human sexuality. Normalizing these differences allows mental health professionals to approach conversations about sex with greater context, recognizing that the mind’s erotic life is tightly interwoven with a person’s fundamental psychological makeup.
The study, “Associations between big five personality traits, facets, and sexual fantasies,” was authored by Emily Cannoot, Amy C. Moors, and William J. Chopik.
