Social influence effects on responses to sexually explicit material containing violence

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Abstract
An experiment was conducted to examine the impact of social influence on sexual and affective responses to sexually explicit material containing violence in both men and women. The story outcome (woman expressing pleasure vs. no pleasure) was varied in addition to the type of social influence message (high vs. low arousal). The results showed that the social influence message was effective in either raising or lowering subjects’ sexual arousal and positive affect, according to the direction of the influence message. In addition, there were no differences in sexual or affective responses to the two stories, suggesting that the normative information affected responses to a greater extent than the story outcome. These findings indicate that social influence is one determinant of cognitive arousal and affective responses to sexually explicit material containing violence.