Understanding Human Ambivalence About
Sex:
The Effects of Stripping Sex of Meaning
continued from
STUDY 1
In Study 1, we assessed the impact of thoughts of physical sex on the
accessibility of death-related thoughts after creatureliness had been
primed. Participants were primed with creatureliness reminders via the
essays used in Goldenberg et al. (2001) that discussed the similarity or
dissimilarity between humans and other animals. Participants then completed
the physical or romantic sex subscales used in Goldenberg et al. (1999),
followed by a measure of death accessability. We hypothesized that when
participants were reminded of their similarity to other animals, sex would
be stripped of its meaning, and consequently, death thoughts would be more
accessible following the physical sex prime than following the romantic sex
prime. However, when the special position of humans in the animal kingdom
was fortified, we did not expect the physical sex prime to increase
death-thought accessibility. Because of the hypothesized impact of the
creatureliness prime manipulation, we expected neuroticism to play a
diminished role in the current experiment.
Method
Participants
Participants were 66 females and 52 males enrolled in introductory
psychology classes at three Colorado universities who participated in
exchange for course credit. Ages ranged from 17 to 54, M = 24.08, SD = 8.15.
Materials and Procedure
Materials were administered in a classroom setting. After obtaining
informed consent, the experimenter instructed participants to work through
the packets at their own pace and assured them that all responses would be
held in strictest confidence. The packets took approximately 25 minutes to
complete. Participants were then extensively debriefed.
Neuroticism. To categorize participants as high or low in neuroticism, we
administered the neuroticism subscale of the Eysenck Personality Inventory (Eysenck
& Eysenck, 1967), embedded second among several filler measures (in order of
presentation, Rosenberg, 1965; Noll & Fredrickson, 1998; Franzoi & Sheilds,
1984) to maintain the cover story of a "personality assessment." Neuroticism
scores were computed by summing the number of affirmative responses on the
23-item measure.
Creatureliness prime. To prime or buffer creatureliness, we provided
participants with an essay with one of two themes: the similarity of humans
to other animals or the uniqueness of humans as compared with other animals
(Goldenberg et al., 2001). The former essay claimed that "the boundary
between humans and animals is not as great as most people think" and "what
appears to be the result of complex thought and free will is really just the
result of our biological programming and simple learning experiences." The
latter essay, on the other hand, stated that "Although we humans have some
things in common with other animals, human beings are truly unique ... we
are not simple selfish creatures driven by hunger and lust, but complex
individuals with a will of our own, capable of making choices, and creating
our own destinies." Both essays were described as written by honors students
at a local university and were entitled "The most important things that I
have learned about human nature." Students were instructed to read the essay
carefully because they were to be asked several questions about the essay at
the end of the packet.
Sexual prime manipulation. We used the measure developed by Goldenberg et
al. (1999) to make salient either the physical or romantic aspects of the
sexual experience. The measure consists of 20 items, 10 of which reflect
physical aspects of sex (e.g., "feeling my genitals respond sexually" and
"feeling my partner's sweat on my body") and 10 of which reflect the
romantic or personal connection aspect of sex (e.g., "feeling close to my
partner" and "expressing love for my partner"). Because romantic items
reflect the aspects of the sexual experience that are symbolic and unique to
humans, they should not be threatening. For this study (as in Goldenberg et
al., 1999, Study 2), participants were provided with one of the two
subscales. The instructions for the physical sex subscale were as follows:
"Please take a few moments and think about what it is about having sex that
appeals to you. You need not have experienced the actual behaviors listed
below, nor do you need to currently have a partner. Please rate how
appealing each experience would be at this moment and respond with the first
answer that comes to mind." For the romantic subscale the words "having sex"
were replaced with "making love." The measures were not scored, but were
used only to prime thoughts of physical or romantic sex.
Negative affect. The Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS;
Watson, Clark, & Tellegen, 1988), a 20-item mood measure, followed the
sexual prime manipulation. A negative affect score was calculated by
computing the mean of the 10-item subscale. The PANAS was included to
confirm that the effects of our manipulation were specific to death
accessibility and were not caused by negative affect.
Death word accessibility measure. The dependent measure for this study
consisted of the word-fragment completion task used in Goldenberg et al.
(1999) and other terror management studies, and was based on similar
measures used in other research (e.g., Bassili & Smith, 1986). Participants
were provided with 25 word fragments, 5 of which could be completed with
either a death-related word or a neutral word. For example, COFF_ _ could be
completed as "coffin" or "coffee." Death thought accessibility scores
consisted of the number of death-related responses.
Essay evaluation. At the end of the packet we included the six items used
by Goldenberg et al. (2001) to assess participants' reactions to the essay.
Specifically, participants were asked, "How much do you think you would like
this person?," "How intelligent do you believe this person to be?," "How
knowledgeable do you believe this person to be?," "Is this person's opinion
well-informed?," "How much do you agree with this person's opinion?," and
"From your perspective, how true do you think this person's opinion is of
the topic they discussed?" All items were responded to on 9-point scales,
with 1 reflecting the most negative evaluation and 9 reflecting the most
positive. We computed a composite measure of reactions to the essays by
taking the mean of the responses to the six items (Cronbach's Alpha = .90).
Results
Essay Evaluations
A one-tailed t test confirmed that people had more negative reactions to
the humans are animals essay compared to the humans are unique essay, t
(112) = -1.81, p = .035, Ms = 5.36 (SD = 1.57) and 5.88 (SD = 1.51),
respectively.
Death Thought Accessibility
Although we had no a priori hypotheses concerning gender, we included
gender as a variable in a preliminary analysis. The results revealed that
there were no main effects of gender, nor did gender interact with any of
the other variables. Further, identical patterns of significant results were
obtained on the other independent variables with or without gender.
Therefore, gender was dropped from the analysis.
A 2 (creatureliness prime) X 2 (sex prime) X 2 (neuroticism) ANOVA was
then performed on death-thought accessibility scores. Neuroticism was
dichotomized into a high-neuroticism group--those scoring at or above the
median of 10--and a low-neuroticism group--those scoring below 10. There
were no effects involving neuroticism in the ANOVA, nor were there any
effects of neuroticism when we followed this test up with hierarchical
regression analyses (Cohen & Cohen, 1983) treating neuroticism as a
continuous variable (all ps > .13).
As predicted the analysis revealed the predicted creatureliness X sex
prime interaction, F (1, 110) = 5.07, p = .026. Means and standard
deviations are reported in Table 1. Tests for simple main effects within the
humans are animals condition revealed more death-related words after the
physical sex prime than after the romantic sex prime, F (1,110) = 4.57, p =
.035, whereas in the humans are unique condition the difference was in the
opposite direction but was not statistically significant (p = .28). No other
pair-wise comparisons were significant.
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