Sexual motives as mediators of the association between social anxiety and sexual satisfaction in mixed-gender couples
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Social anxiety is a common mental health issue for many people, and it is characterized by feelings of anxiety and fear of negative evaluations by others in social situations. Socially anxious people form romantic relationships with others despite their worries, but many report dissatisfaction with sexual interactions. One reason that socially anxious people experience dissatisfying sex lives may be their motives for engaging in sex with intimate partners. Specifically, the authors hypothesized that social anxiety would be related to fewer approach and more avoidance motives, which would, in turn, be associated with lower relationship satisfaction for individuals and their partners. These hypotheses were pre-registered on AsPredicted. The authors examined the hypotheses in 128 cohabitating mixed-gender couples over 1 year. Multilevel models using the actor–partner interdependence framework partially supported the hypotheses. Social anxiety was not related to avoidance motives, although avoidance motives were associated with sexual satisfaction. In contrast, approach motives partially mediated the negative association between social anxiety and sexual satisfaction. No partner effects were observed. Thus, as people experienced greater social anxiety, they were less likely to engage in sex with their partners for approach reasons, and in turn, they were less sexually satisfied over 1 year. Our findings underscore the importance of supporting socially anxious individuals in approaching sexual and relational experiences from a place of genuine desire and connection, rather than merely seeking to manage discomfort, to foster more positive sexual interactions with their partners.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".