A study in China explored emotional and heart rate changes happening when participants listened to erotic, happy, and neutral audio sequences. It found that women tended to report a higher level of shame than men when listening to erotic audios. Unlike men, they also found these audios to be less pleasant than happy audio sequences. The study was published in Behavioral Sciences.
Sexual arousal is a dynamic combination of physiological, cognitive and emotional changes that prepare the body for sexual activity. Stimuli that can cause sexual arousal are referred to as erotic stimuli. Exposure to erotic stimuli is associated with a range of positive and negative emotional experiences, ranging from pleasant, passionate, ashamed, embarrassed or disgusted.
Studies have indicated that men demonstrate higher sexual arousal compared to women. Physiological and reported subjective manifestations of sexual arousal are also in greater concordance in men than in women. Men tend to rate erotic stimuli as more pleasant than do women.
In contrast, erotic stimuli can provoke negative emotions in women. Of these, shame and embarrassment are the most commonly reported. This has led researchers to conclude that there might be a gender difference in the pattern of emotional responses to erotic stimuli.
Study authors Zhongming Gao and his colleagues wanted to explore gender differences in positive and negative emotions, as well as in cardiac responses to erotic audio sequences. They note that visual erotic stimuli have been widely studied before, but that studies dealing with auditory stimuli are few.
They conducted a study in which they exposed healthy male and female participants to erotic, neutral, and happy audio segments, while these participants reported their levels of pleasure and shame. While presenting these audio sequences, the researchers took electrocardiograms of participants’ heart activity.
Participants were 40 Han Chinese adults (20 women and 20 men). Their age ranged between 18 and 27 years. They were recruited by flyers posted in libraries in the China West Normal University. All participants reported being heterosexual.
At the beginning of the study, participants were set up with an electrocardiogram recording system and asked to adjust the volume on their earphones. Audio sequences were than played to their earphones. Participants were asked to rate pleasure and shame that they felt while listening to these audio clips.
Each audio clip was 5 seconds long and there were 2 audio clips for each category (6 in total). The sequence of video clips was randomized and it was made sure that no two audio sequences from the same category were next to each other. Each participant completed 3 such blocks of audio clips.
Erotic audio clips were extracted from Pornhub, neutral clips from ximalaya.com and happy clips from chinaz.com. “Specifically, the erotic audios were extracted, which included sounds of having sex, such as moaning (mainly from women), thrusting, and sounds of water and lubrication. The neutral audios were extracted from sounds of Mandarin reading, such as the introduction of stones, technical reports, and weather forecasts. Meanwhile, the happy audios were of laughter,” the study authors explained.
Results showed that women rated happy audios as the most pleasant, while erotic audios received lowest average pleasantness ratings of the three types of sequences. Men rated erotic and happy audios as equally pleasurable and more so than neutral audios.
Both men and women tended to report feelings of shame only while listening to erotic audios, but women more than men. Feelings of shame when listening to the other two types of audios were almost zero on average in both men and women.
Erotic stimuli induced a greater deceleration of heart rate than both neutral and happy stimuli in both genders. These changes were not associated with the reported level of pleasure or shame.
“Our results demonstrated distinct emotions regarding erotica between genders, with women reporting a higher level of shame compared to men, and rating erotic stimuli as neutral. Meanwhile, men tended to feel more pleasant when exposed to erotic relative to neutral stimuli. Cardiac data indicated that both genders showed comparable heart rate deceleration in response to erotica compared to neutral and happy stimuli,” the authors concluded.
The study makes a valuable contribution to the scientific understanding of human sexual responses. However, it also has limitations that need to be taken into account. Notably, sexual experience can affect sexual responses, but it was not controlled in the study. Also, personal beliefs can influence feelings reported in response to sexual stimuli and they were not accounted for in the study.
The study, “Distinct Emotional and Cardiac Responses to Audio Erotica between Genders”, was authored by Zhongming Gao, Xi Luo, and Xianwei Che.