Sexual Experiences and Thought Patterns

This research investigates individual’s thoughts about their sexual experiences and how their sexual confidence may impact the kinds of thoughts they make. Using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, we conducted a survey that assessed one’s sexual confidence and their thought patterns for either an unsatisfying or satisfying, prompted, sexual experience and whether that was associated with internal and/ or external attributions related to themselves, their partner, or if it was circumstantial. The research has found that internal attributions, related to the self, and external attributions, related to the partner, occurred more for satisfying experiences than unsatisfying experiences while circumstantial, external attributions were not significant. There were also significant interactions between internal, self attributions and sexual-anxiety. Had COVID-19 not occurred, we would have furthered this study by revising our scales and additionally asked questions related to whether the individual was sexually submissive versus dominant and whether that played a role in attribution thought patterns as opposed to the sexual satisfaction questions asked in our original study