Cross-sectional and prospective associations between self-compassion and sexual distress in couples coping with sexual interest/arousal disorder
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: When an individual in a relationship is coping with low desire/arousal, both partners experience difficulties, including higher levels of sexual distress. Effective emotional regulation strategies, such as self-compassion, could have individual and interpersonal benefits for couples with sexual interest/arousal disorder (SIAD). AIM: Using a dyadic design, we examined the role of self-compassion in the sexual distress of couples coping with SIAD, accounting for overall relationship satisfaction. The associations were analyzed cross-sectionally and prospectively. We also explored the moderating roles of having at least one member identify as sexually or gender diverse within the couple in the potential associations between self-compassion and sexual distress. METHODS: Individuals with SIAD and their partners (N = 263 couples) completed online measures at baseline and 6 months later. OUTCOMES: Individuals with SIAD and their partners completed the Sexual Distress Scale-Short Form and the Couples Satisfaction Index. RESULTS: Controlling for relationship satisfaction, when individuals coping with SIAD and their partners reported greater self-compassion at baseline, they also reported lower sexual distress. For partners only, greater self-compassion was associated with the person with SIAD's lower levels of sexual distress at baseline. No statistically significant prospective associations were found between levels of self-compassion and sexual distress 6 months later. Belonging to a sexually diverse couple was a significant moderator of the cross-sectional associations between partners' level of self-compassion and their own level of sexual distress at baseline, such that the link between greater self-compassion and lower sexual distress was observed only in partners belonging to a sexually diverse couple. Belonging to a gender diverse couple did not moderate any of the associations. CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS: Findings indicate that self-compassion could be a promising tool to reduce sexual distress in couples coping with SIAD. STRENGTHS & LIMITATIONS: Strengths of this study include the large, diverse sample of couples coping with SIAD, the use of a cross-sectional and prospective design, and the examination of the moderating role of belonging to a gender or sexually diverse couple. However, the possible lack of statistical power to measure moderation based on belonging to a gender diverse couple and the recall bias due to the use of self-report questionnaires should be considered when interpreting the results. CONCLUSION: Greater self-compassion is associated with lower sexual distress in both partners of couples coping with SIAD. Self-compassion may be particularly beneficial for partners of individuals with SIAD belonging to a sexually diverse couple.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 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".