Research on “violent erotica”: A reply

Abstract

The criticisms center on the following: (a) He questions our assertion that a mean arousal level of about 48% can be labeled "highly aroused;" (b) he asserts that there was a low relationship between the two measures of sexual arousal, thereby questioning the convergent validity of the measures; and (c) he asserts that our conclusion that exposure to a rape abhorrence tape resulted in inhibited sexual arousal to a subsequent rape depiction is "incom- patible with the authors' main hypothesis" (p. 329). I will briefly address each of these three points. First, even a cursory survey of literature on sexual arousal will show that an average self-reported sexual arousal of close to 50% in response to a brief story, particularly a rape story, is a very high level indeed. Second, Mould also shows little awareness of the literature when he argues that the lack of high correlations between physiological and self-report measures of sexual arousal indicates a lack of validity in these measures. There has been considerable discussion regarding the conditions under which such measures yield high or low correlations (e.g., Earls & Marshall, 1983). It has been suggested that sexual arousal is not a unitary construct and that self- report and physiological measures may be assessing differing dimensions of a multidimensional construct (Blader & Marshall, 1984). Additionally, it is noteworthy that very frequently, researchers have relied only on self-report (e.g., Mosher & Anderson, 1986) or physiological measures (e.g., Freund, Scher, Racansky, Campbell, & Heasman, 1986) of sexual arousal. We have typically used both, and, consistent with other studies using similar condi- tions, we have found significant, albeit not very high, correlations between them. We continue to believe that the use of both measures enhances our research by providing useful information regarding a multidimensional con- struct.