Sexual shame: an intervening factor between sexual education in the home and healthy sexual passion development?

In this study we explored the associations between sexual education in the home and sexual shame and whether these variables were associated with levels of harmonious, obsessive, and inhibited sexual passion. In turn, we explored how all of these variables were associated with sexual and relationship satisfaction while controlling for religiosity, shyness, impulsivity and other common demographic variables. With a sample of 1424 adults, we found that reports of sex education while growing up had strong negative associations with sexual shame, which had strong positive associations with inhibited sexual passion and moderate to weak positive associations with harmonious and obsessive passion. Sexual passion types had strong associations with sexual and relationship satisfaction. Additionally, shyness was negatively associated with sex education and positively associated with sexual shame and inhibited sexual passion. Impulsivity was negatively associated with harmonious sexual passion and positively associated with obsessive sexual passion. The findings suggest that increasing sexual education in the home may help reduce sexual shame and increase harmonious sexual passion even in the presence of higher levels of shyness and impulsivity in children. Increasing harmonious sexual passion is likely to positively influence sexual and relationship outcomes.