The ebb and flow of sexual well-being: The contributions of basic psychological needs and autonomous and controlled sexual motivation to daily variations in sexual well-being
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Why do people have better sexual experiences on certain days but not others? In this study, we used self-determination theory (SDT) to examine whether sexual motives that are autonomous (i.e., genuinely self-endorsed) as opposed to controlled (i.e., pressured) were associated with variations in daily sexual well-being. We also sought to identify circumstances associated with changes in the quality of sexual motivation by considering the extent to which daily interactions with a partner satisfied the basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. In a 21-day study of daily experiences ( N = 113), findings from multilevel analyses suggested that on days when sexual motives were more autonomous and less controlled, people experienced higher sexual well-being (i.e., higher sexual satisfaction, more positive sexual affect, and less negative sexual affect). Furthermore, on days when interactions with the partner were more positive, as evidenced by better needs satisfaction, sexual motives were more autonomous and this, in turn, was associated with higher sexual well-being. These associations held above the contributions of gender, relationship length, frequency of sexual activities, and relational satisfaction. These findings demonstrate the usefulness of SDT as a framework for the motivational underpinnings of sexual well-being.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".