Stimulus Preference and Mental Imagery: Influencing the Way Sexual Stimuli are Viewed and the Intensity of Subjective Sexual Arousal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: The connection between mental imagery and feelings of presence within a film has not yet been investigated in sex research in relation to observational stance (imagining oneself as either a spectator or participant while viewing a film). Several studies have shown that people who take a participant stance when viewing a sexual film are more likely to report greater subjective sexual arousal (SSA). Research on observational stance has also found that viewing a preferred stimulus is predictive of taking a participant stance. Despite this, very few studies have allowed participants to select their own stimuli.
 Methodology: Sexual films that were researcher-selected or participant-selected will be presented to women and men, while continuously measuring their SSA. Information will be collected about observational stance and vividness of mental imagery via questionnaires.
 Expected Results:
 1. Greater mental imagery ability will be associated with adopting a participant stance.
 2. The relationship between mental imagery ability and taking a participant stance will be stronger for participant-selected sexual stimuli than for researcher-selected sexual stimuli.
 3. Taking a participant stance will be associated with greater SSA.
 4. The relationship between taking a participant stance and SSA will be stronger for participant-selected sexual stimuli than for researcher-selected stimuli.
 Conclusions: This project is the first to examine the relationship between mental imagery and observational stance for sexual stimuli, and is among the first to allow participants to self-select stimuli. Results of this project will encourage the development of standardized procedures for providing participants with optimal sexual stimulation.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| 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".