Page 80 - Emotions through the eyes of our closest living relatives- Exploring attentional and behavioral mechanisms

Chapter 3
However, in our study, the percentages were about 81% for women and 87% for men. A possible explanation for this effect is that we included more women-friendly images (i.e., pictures of couples embracing, with no close-ups of their genitalia or explicit depiction of sexual acts). Indeed, previous research has shown that women report increased negative affect after viewing mainstream (i.e., male-centered) sexual material (Koukounas & McCabe, 1997) but increased positive affect after viewing women-friendly material (Laan et al., 1994; Mosher & MacIan, 1994, see also Heiman, 1977). The contextual cues provided in women-friendly sexual material facilitate their positive appraisal and might promote the detection of sexual feelings in women (Laan & Everaerd, 1995; Laan & Janssen, 2007). Given these findings, the observed gender differences in self-report of positive affect might be due to stimulus selection, even though men consistently tend to give higher ratings to sexual material (Janssen et al., 2003). Alternatively, social desirability factors were at play, as women might be more inclined to modulate self-reports of positive affect in response to sexual material (Morokoff, 1985; but see Brody et al., 2003). In contrast, men might overestimate their responses (Catania et al., 1990). The difference between the current and the previous study might reflect a cultural difference between the USA versus the Netherlands. For example, while naked breasts or explicit sex scenes are common in typical European movies, such scenes are less common in American movies. Although we cannot with certainty say what the different finding in the literature regarding the perception of sexual images in males as compared to females causes, a crucial consideration is that our sample consisted of people from the general public. This implies that our findings are more representative for the general population than previous laboratory- conducted sex research that typically included students.
Compared to male participants, females interpreted the human distress and yawn scenes relatively negatively. These findings are in line with earlier literature. The majority of previous work used images from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS; Lang et al., 2005), a collection of standardized and digitized color photographs that depict objects and scenes. Although considerable agreement has been found between men and women in their categorical labeling of these images to different emotions (Mikels et al., 2005), women typically assign unpleasant pictures a more negative valence rating than do men (Bradley et al., 2001; Gard & Kring, 2007).
Apart from valence ratings, we also asked participants how they perceived the scenes in terms of eliciting arousal. In general, they evaluated the emotional scenes as more arousing than the neutral scenes. Play scenes received the highest intensity scores and the self-scratch category the least. Interesting differences were
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