Grant: Project Grant

Sexual health is an integral part of physical and mental health, quality of life, and healthy relationships. Sexual arousal and desire problems, however, affect up to one third of women, yet approved treatments do not yet exist. One impediment to effective treatment is poor understanding of how sexual difficulties develop in women. Recently, scientists have reconceptualized sexual desire as being triggered by sexual cues and emerging from sexual arousal, instead of a drive, like hunger, that motivates people to seek out sex. This new model of sexual response more accurately captures women's experiences and may better characterize women's sexual difficulties, but it has not been scientifically tested. Our primary objective is to understand the relationships among neural and cognitive processing of sexual cues, sexual arousal, and sexual desire. We will assess neural responses and attention to sexual cues (electroencephalography to assess neural responses, eyetracking to assess gaze patterns, computer-based tasks to assess attention), sexual responses to sexual cues (physical/psychological sexual arousal), and sexual desire (lab tasks, questionnaires) in women with and without sexual arousal and desire difficulties. One day after completing these tasks, women will complete measures of their experience of responsive sexual desire. Understanding the relationships between sexual arousal and desire will create gender-specific knowledge about women's sexuality and about the causes of women's sexual difficulties, will have direct implications for identifying risk factors for sexual arousal and desire problems, will inform treatment decisions, and will decrease the burden of sexual difficulties and its negative impacts for Canadian women.