Sexual arousal is a multidimensional construct encompassing physiological, emotional, motivational, and cognitive components. The information-processing models of sexual response posit that sexual arousal can be unconsciously triggered by exposure to sexual stimuli. However, the empirical research supporting this claim is limited and largely based on the heterosexual population. Therefore, the current study aimed to explore the pre-attentional processing of sexual stimuli in the non-hetero/allosexual population (individuals experiencing non-heterosexual attraction) and its associations with sexual arousal propensities. We have employed the breaking continuous flash suppression (b-CFS) paradigm to measure the breakthrough time of sexually explicit versus non-sexual and neutral stimuli into the awareness of lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) participants. Sexually explicit stimuli were expected to trigger more pre-attentional resources, resulting in lower response times until detection compared to other types of stimuli. Moreover, the faster detection of sexual stimuli was expected to be associated with LGB participants´ propensity for higher sexual excitation and lower sexual inhibition traits. Despite such expectations, findings did not support the assumption that sexually explicit stimuli are detected faster; similarly, no associations were found between response times toward the critical stimuli and participants’ sexual excitation and inhibition tendencies. While the current results extend on the literature by adding how non-heterosexual/allosexual individuals detect sexual stimuli at early stages of information processing, the current evidence does not support previous theoretical models, pointing to the complexities underpinning how sexualized stimuli unveil to the human mind.
Kostiukova et al. (Thu,) studied this question.