Automatic Distraction by Sexual Images: Gender Differences

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Review of manuscript Sexes-3164867

Title: Automatic Distraction by Sexual Images: Gender Differences.

Authors: Snowden, Midgley, Gray

 

In their paper "Automatic Distraction by Sexual Images: Gender Differences”, Snowden et al. report findings from two related experiments that assessed distractibility of women and men by visual sexual stimuli. Participants’ decision times were recorded while they were instructed to respond to visual targets while ignoring concurrently presented erotic images used as distractors. The results suggest higher effect sizes as well as a more pronounced category-specificity (in terms of sexual interest) in heterosexual men.

Overall, this paper is very well-written and addresses an important research question with substantial relevance to the field. The two experimental studies that are presented appear to be well-conducted and technically sound. The data are presented in a straightforward way and the structure of the manuscript is clear. However, both the introduction and discussion lack theoretical depth, and sometimes it seems as if the existing literature has been consulted in a too selective and narrow manner (e.g., mostly with regard to the experimental task at hand and related buzz words such as “distraction”). There should at least be an attempt to explain what ‘constructs’ in terms of cognitive and/or affective processes are reflected in the task used. It would also be interesting to address the even more fundamental question (at least by speculating a bit) what neurocognitive mechanisms underlie the gender differences found in the present study.

That said, as most of my concerns are comparatively minor and relate mainly to the framing of the results as well as some methodological issues, I am confident that - after a thorough revision that includes the points mentioned below - this paper can become an interesting contribution to the literature.

 

1)     Given the scope of the research question, the survey of existing research on gender differences in category-specific responding to sexual stimuli is incomplete and overly simplified, as it cites mainly studies by the authors themselves and another research group (ref. 30-39). While the critical discussion of previous findings (such as Wright & Adams) is appreciated, the introduction falls short of explaining how existing research may relate to important theoretical distinctions such as the role of automatic vs. controlled processes in sexual arousal. Therefore, a short review of other, related studies that compared responses to same-sex vs. other-sex stimuli by means of psychophysiological measures as well as brain imaging may be relevant and of interest to the reader.

2)     What exactly was the nature of the “other tasks not reported” in the present report? Did they take part after or before the experiment described in the manuscript? Can the authors rule out any priming effects, for instance?

3)     In a similar vein: Could pre-exposure to the images in the information sheet have influenced the results?

4)     In their evaluation of the results, the authors sometimes dismiss p-values below .10 as not significant (regarding the violation of sphericity [p. 6], for instance, or the potential main effect of gender in the analysis of error data [p. 10]), while at other times they speak of “marginal significance” (p.6) apparently because it better fits their hypotheses.

5)     Speaking of hypothesis testing, how did the authors control for alpha error inflation with respect to all the post-hoc tests/multiple comparisons they have run?

6)     The authors note the lack of statistical power as well as low reliability with regard to their first experiment. Given this outcome: How did they determine an adequate sample size for study 2?

7)     It seems that while only data from heterosexual participants were included in study 2, no such rule of exclusion was applied in study 1 (even though the Kinsey scale was administered in both circumstances). What was the rationale for this difference?

8)     The findings are framed as reflecting “automatic” processing at several points in the manuscript. However, this seems questionable, as there are a multitude of pre-attentive as well as attentional (and even deliberate) cognitive processes that may cause distraction. In contrast to electrophysiological as well as other psychophysiological markers (startle, pupil etc.), reaction times are generally considered much less ‘implicit’ and even much more prone to demand characteristics.

9)     How did the authors verify participants’ adherence to instructions (‘ignore’)?

10)  Given that a fixation cross was shown in both experiments, centering the participants’ attention on the image at the start of each trial, I wonder whether an explanation in terms of ‘disengagement of attention’ rather than distraction would be more appropriate for the construct that was assessed by this task (especially regarding exp. 1). In my view, there may be a subtle, but important conceptual difference between automatic attentional capture (in the first place) and the difficulty to withdraw one’s attention (which probably requires additional executive resources).

11)  The latter issue may also have important implications for the interpretation of different result patterns of exp. 1 and 2, which should be addressed in the discussion. Given crucial differences in methodology (presentation duration in particular), it is rather astonishing that the authors provide so little in terms of a comparison as well as theoretical integration of the two experiments.

 

Minor:

12)  The acronym “SCID” may be problematic as it is strongly linked to “Structured Clinical Interview for DSM…” in the context of psychology. I would suggest to a different phrasing.

13)  Throughout the manuscript “stimuli” is used as a singular as well as plural form (e.g., p. 2 [l. 47], p. 8 [l. 321] etc.), even though the correct singular is “stimulus”. This should be corrected.

14)  There is a SPACE missing in the description of the Y axis in both figures (before “(ms)”, panel B).

15)  P. 9 (l. 362): “trails” instead of “trials”.

16)  P. 12 (l. 509): “changes in sexually throughout the lifetime”

 

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Native speakers. Good style overall. Some minor errors and awkward phrasing.

Author Response

Reviewer 1: Review of manuscript Sexes-3164867 Title: Automatic Distraction by Sexual Images: Gender Differences. Authors: Snowden, Midgley, Gray In their paper "Automatic Distraction by Sexual Images: Gender Differences”,

 

Snowden et al. report findings from two related experiments that assessed distractibility of women and men by visual sexual stimuli. Participants’ decision times were recorded while they were instructed to respond to visual targets while ignoring concurrently presented erotic images used as distractors. The results suggest higher effect sizes as well as a more pronounced category-specificity (in terms of sexual interest) in heterosexual men. Overall, this paper is very well-written and addresses an important research question with substantial relevance to the field. The two experimental studies that are presented appear to be well-conducted and technically sound. The data are presented in a straightforward way and the structure of the manuscript is clear. However, both the introduction and discussion lack theoretical depth, and sometimes it seems as if the existing literature has been consulted in a too selective and narrow manner (e.g., mostly with regard to the experimental task at hand and related buzz words such as “distraction”). There should at least be an attempt to explain what ‘constructs’ in terms of cognitive and/or affective processes are reflected in the task used. It would also be interesting to address the even more fundamental question (at least by speculating a bit) what neurocognitive mechanisms underlie the gender differences found in the present study. That said, as most of my concerns are comparatively minor and relate mainly to the framing of the results as well as some methodological issues, I am confident that - after a thorough revision that includes the points mentioned below - this paper can become an interesting contribution to the literature.

COMMENT: We thank the reviewer for their kind comments and suggestions to improve the paper.

 

 

• Given the scope of the research question, the survey of existing research on gender differences in category-specific responding to sexual stimuli is incomplete and overly simplified, as it cites mainly studies by the authors themselves and another research group (ref. 30-39). While the critical discussion of previous findings (such as Wright & Adams) is appreciated, the introduction falls short of explaining how existing research may relate to important theoretical distinctions such as the role of automatic vs. controlled processes in sexual arousal. Therefore, a short review of other, related studies that compared responses to same-sex vs. other-sex stimuli by means of psychophysiological measures as well as brain imaging may be relevant and of interest to the reader.

COMMENT:  We have added such a short review as suggested (page 4-5).

 

• What exactly was the nature of the “other tasks not reported” in the present report? Did they take part after or before the experiment described in the manuscript? Can the authors rule out any priming effects, for instance?

COMMENT:  In experiment 1, the “other tasks” measured pupillary responses to facial expressions as part of pilot work for other experiments. These were completed after the task reported here and so could not produce any priming effects.  In experiment 2, the task reported was part of a “battery” of four tests.  The other three tasks were a similar emotional distraction task that used negative and positive images (but not sexual ones), a questionnaire relating to aggressive behaviours, and a measure of narcissism and aggression. Hence, none of the other studies involved sexual images, etc.  The order of the tasks was different for each participant. I can see no reason why these tasks would affect performance in the task reported.

 

• In a similar vein: Could pre-exposure to the images in the information sheet have influenced the results?

COMMENT:  All participants were asked to view these images as part of our ethical approval to make sure no one would be upset/offended in the main task. It is not possible to rule-out that such pre-exposure might have influenced the results in some manner. But this seems unlikely and the same procedures were in place for all participants.  We have added this as a limitation in the Discussion.

 

• In their evaluation of the results, the authors sometimes dismiss p-values below .10 as not significant (regarding the violation of sphericity [p. 6], for instance, or the potential main effect of gender in the analysis of error data [p. 10]), while at other times they speak of “marginal significance” (p.6) apparently because it better fits their hypotheses.

COMMENT: We accept the reviewers point that our presentation was inconsistent. We have altered the statement (original page 6) that used the term “marginal significance” to state “The interaction term between gender and distractor type was not significant, F(4, 164) = 2.29, p = .06, η_p² = .05”

 

• Speaking of hypothesis testing, how did the authors control for alpha error inflation with respect to all the post-hoc tests/multiple comparisons they have run?

COMMENT: We did not correct for multiple comparisons as these were planned analyses of the hypotheses.  All the crucial comparisons were significant at the p < .001 level and hence would survive such corrections is used.

 

• The authors note the lack of statistical power as well as low reliability with regard to their first experiment. Given this outcome: How did they determine an adequate sample size for study 2?

COMMENT: We did not have an “effect size” on which to base our calculations. We therefore powered the study to be able to detect a “medium” effect size in the difference in scores between the male and female groups. A sample size of 50 per group leads to be able to detect such an effect with standard alpha (.05, one-tailed) and power (0.80). We have added a sentence in the text (page 10).

 

• It seems that while only data from heterosexual participants were included in study 2, no such rule of exclusion was applied in study 1 (even though the Kinsey scale was administered in both circumstances). What was the rationale for this difference?

COMMENT:  Our original focus (Experiment 1) was on the distraction effect caused by the erotic couple stimuli and whether this was different for men and women. We therefore used all the participants irrespective of their Kinsey score. Exeripment 2 aimed to focus on the difference in distraction between male and female images and hence it was felt more appropriate in this experiment to exclude people not reporting a mainly heterosexual orientation. However, we take the point of the reviewer that this is a difference between the studies. We have re-analysed Experiment 1 removing those with a Kinsey score of 2 or greater (N = 5). The same pattern of results occurred with all the tests we report as significant (or not) being the same in the re-analysis. We have added a sentence (page 7) stating this.

 

• The findings are framed as reflecting “automatic” processing at several points in the manuscript. However, this seems questionable, as there are a multitude of pre-attentive as well as attentional (and even deliberate) cognitive processes that may cause distraction. In contrast to electrophysiological as well as other psychophysiological markers (startle, pupil etc.), reaction times are generally considered much less ‘implicit’ and even much more prone to demand characteristics.

COMMENT:  We use the term “automatic” in the sense used by many other researchers to signify that the distractor is irrelevant to the task, give no information as to the possible location of the target or the response to be made, and participants are told to try and ignore the distractor. (This is stated on page 2 of the original ms).

 

• How did the authors verify participants’ adherence to instructions (‘ignore’)?

COMMENT:  We did not have any means of verifying this.

 

 

• Given that a fixation cross was shown in both experiments, centering the participants’ attention on the image at the start of each trial, I wonder whether an explanation in terms of ‘disengagement of attention’ rather than distraction would be more appropriate for the construct that was assessed by this task (especially regarding exp. 1). In my view, there may be a subtle, but important conceptual difference between automatic attentional capture (in the first place) and the difficulty to withdraw one’s attention (which probably requires additional executive resources).

COMMENT:  We agree with the view of the reviewer. Indeed, in experiments we hope to submit for publication at some point in the future, we have used a version of the EDT where the picture is presented at the point of fixation, removed, and then the target is presented at the point of fixation. We also find effects of erotic content in these experiments. Hence, we also believe that the effect is more due to the erotic stimuli “holding” attentional resources for longer (or more of them).   Our original ms stated “The results are thought to reflect that erotic stimuli automatically attract attention leaving less resources to process the lines, and hence the slower reaction times (also [20, 21]” to which we have now added “though an explanation in terms of both neutral and erotic stimuli both initially attracting attention but that it may be harder to disengage attention from the erotic stimulus would also explain these results.”

 

• The latter issue may also have important implications for the interpretation of different result patterns of exp. 1 and 2, which should be addressed in the discussion. Given crucial differences in methodology (presentation duration in particular), it is rather astonishing that the authors provide so little in terms of a comparison as well as theoretical integration of the two experiments.

COMMENT:  The effects of duration of the distracting emotional images has not, to our knowledge, been explored in previous (or our) studies. We have added a paragraph discussing its possible consequences in the Discussion as suggested by the reviewer (page 13).

 

Minor:

• The acronym “SCID” may be problematic as it is strongly linked to “Structured Clinical Interview for DSM…” in the context of psychology. I would suggest to a different phrasing.

COMMENT:  While we appreciate the point being made (one of the authors is a clinical psychologist well versed in the SCID interview) the acronym SCID for the sexual content induced delay is well established in many papers and not using this may lead to this link being lost.

 

13) Throughout the manuscript “stimuli” is used as a singular as well as plural form (e.g., p. 2 [l. 47], p. 8 [l. 321] etc.), even though the correct singular is “stimulus”. This should be corrected.

COMMENT:  We have tried to correct this throughout the ms.

 

14) There is a SPACE missing in the description of the Y axis in both figures (before “(ms)”, panel B).

COMMENT:  This has been corrected

15) P. 9 (l. 362): “trails” instead of “trials”.

COMMENT:  This has been corrected

16) P. 12 (l. 509): “changes in sexually throughout the lifetime”

COMMENT:  This has been corrected

 

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Thank you for the opportunity to review this paper presenting data examining attentional adhesion effects of sexual stimuli, gender effects, and specificity of cognitive processing of sexual cues. Over two studies, the authors examined the sexual content induced delay produced by erotic (male/female couples), female, male, and neutral distractors among heterosexual women and men. They predicted greater SCID effects for sexual stimuli, greater SCID effects for men, and gender differences in specificity effects (greater attentional adhesion to preferred gender pictures resulting in longer SCID). Results support the first hypothesis, and there’s some support for the second, although there’s some concerns with the overall gender effects in reaction time that are likely  influencing this gender difference. There was mixed support for the third hypothesis – study 1 showed no specificity effects for either women nor men, and study 2 showed them only for men. These are interesting data that contribute to the growing literature on specificity effects on sexual response and will make a contribution to the literature. I have some questions and suggestions for improvement:

 

Literature review:

I highly recommend that the authors read the more recent of Hyde’s meta-analyses when discussing gender effects on aspects of sexuality:

Petersen, J. L., & Hyde, J. S. (2010). A meta-analytic review of research on gender differences in sexuality, 1993–2007. Psychological bulletin, 136(1), 21.

I also recommend the following for a more nuanced understanding of gender effects on sexual motivation:

Dawson, S. J., & Chivers, M. L. (2014). Gender differences and similarities in sexual desire. Current Sexual Health Reports, 6, 211-219.

Attentional adhesion to sexual stimuli is thought to related to the hedonic value of sexual cues represented in those stimuli. How can the authors be sure that their sexual stimuli were of equal hedonic value for both women and men? Do you have any ratings demonstrating that women judged these stimuli as similarly attractive as men did? I raise this issue because the often-cited gender difference in sex drive may, instead, be considered a problem of low-incentive sexual cues coupled with more limited sexual opportunities (see Chivers & Blumenstock, 2024). The authors are encouraged to take and incentive-motivation perspective in considering the nature of their sexual stimuli and the effects on cognitive processing.

Chivers, M. L., & Blumenstock, S. M. (2024). Beyond Gendered/Sexed Sexual Response: Debunking Essentialism, Revisiting Experience, and Centering Women’s Sexual Pleasure. In Gender Resilience, Integration and Transformation (pp. 61-100). Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland.

Later in the introduction the authors state:

“The majority of studies using the emotional distraction task to examine gender dif-125 ferences reviewed above have used erotic images that depicted both men and women 126 (couples), and/or only the gender that the participant stated they sexually preferred. 127 Hence, a clear distinction of their responses to their preferred and to their non-preferred 128 gender is not possible from these studies.”

-              This is not an accurate summary of the literature – there are many studies that have made comparisons between responses to sexual stimuli featuring only males and only females, such as:

 

Chivers, M. L., Seto, M. C., & Blanchard, R. (2007). Gender and sexual orientation differences in sexual response to sexual activities versus gender of actors in sexual films. Journal of personality and social psychology, 93(6), 1108.

 

Spape, J., Timmers, A. D., Yoon, S., Ponseti, J., & Chivers, M. L. (2014). Gender-specific genital and subjective sexual arousal to prepotent sexual features in heterosexual women and men. Biological Psychology, 102, 1-9.

Micanovic, N., Timmers, A. D., & Chivers, M. L. (2021). Gender-specific genital and subjective sexual arousal to prepotent sexual stimuli in androphilic men and gynephilic women. The Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality, 30(3), 361-373.

Methods: 

Can the authors explain their rationale for using stimuli that were not sexual for the female and male stimulus categories? From the description, it’s clear these were alluring images, but lacked frank depiction of sexual features. Why were those features not included? See later discussion of stimulus prepotency effects.

The authors should comment on the possible effects of seeing the stimuli twice, once during  the consenting process and during the experiment. Did all participants review all sexual stimuli? Is it possible that some participants would look longer at some images than others during the consenting preview, influencing effects on the experiment?

Experiment 1 results:
The lack of gender difference in effect size for the sexual content induced delay needs more consideration – why is the gender difference more relevant than the equivalent effects size for women and men (actually, larger in women)? Could this be related to the overall slower RT for men?

I expect that the lack of specificity effects in Study 1 relate to the male and female stimuli being only weakly hedonic – they need to be more frankly sexual to produce the effect.  

Experiment 2 – Curious about the adjustments made to reduce the potential habituation effects. Why increase the number of neutral stimuli? Why was a reduction by 30 trials in the frequency of sexual stimuli?

Methods, Sample 2: What was the breakdown of Kinsey 0 to 1? There are interesting differences in sexual response patterns of Kinsey 0 and 1 women reported in

Chivers, M. L., Bouchard, K. N., & Timmers, A. D. (2015). Straight but not narrow; Within-gender variation in the gender-specificity of women’s sexual response. PloS one, 10(12), e0142575.

Briefly, only Kinsey 0 women showed nonspecific sexual response; all other women showed greater response to female sexual stimuli.

Methods: The authors wrote:

“Images were chosen from the IAPS and consisted of five images of males, five of fe-350 males, and 20 neutral images (see Appendix 1).”

-              This is confusing – were the IAPS images the neutral category images? Please clarify

Discussion:

Experiment 1 provides, to our knowledge, the first clear evidence for this effect 420 (though see Wiemer et al. [29] for a similar result using a go-nogo task). It is of interest to 421 speculate as to why previous studies have failed to demonstrate this result. Geer and Bel-422 lard [12] showed a clear gender effect but in the opposite direction.

-              Greater effects on men? But the authors also wrote in the results that the magnitude of the effect was similar for women and men; isn’t the latter the more valid index of the effect of sexual stimuli on a person’s attention? These data would suggest that the sexual stimuli are equally attention grabbing for women and men; overall men are simply slower responders in these tasks, and so that would explain the gender difference.  The authors propose that the greater variability in men’s responses contribute to these effects -- what does the greater dispersion of men’s RTs mean?

 

In female versus male stimuli – noting that no specificity effects were detected, discuss that stimuli are likely not potent enough – e.g., did not contain enough sexual cues. Speculate on effects if stimuli were more explicit.

I recommend that the authors develop their discussion of the sexual attractiveness of the images possible factors influencing outcomes in the current data:

see Timmers, A. D., Blumenstock, S. M., DeBruine, L., & Chivers, M. L. (2023). The role of attractiveness in gendered sexual response patterns. The Journal of Sex Research, 1-16.

I believe the Timmers et al results also demonstrated category-specific effects for woman’s sexual response and deserve some discussion in this paper. The nature of the sexual stimuli in their study, and in the Spape et al study, being more sexually explicit  and displaying “prepotent sexual features” needs greater consideration in this manuscript in relation to discussion of the nonspecificity of women’s SCID.

 

 

Author Response

Reviewer 2

 

Thank you for the opportunity to review this paper presenting data examining attentional adhesion effects of sexual stimuli, gender effects, and specificity of cognitive processing of sexual cues. Over two studies, the authors examined the sexual content induced delay produced by erotic (male/female couples), female, male, and neutral distractors among heterosexual women and men. They predicted greater SCID effects for sexual stimuli, greater SCID effects for men, and gender differences in specificity effects (greater attentional adhesion to preferred gender pictures resulting in longer SCID). Results support the first hypothesis, and there’s some support for the second, although there’s some concerns with the overall gender effects in reaction time that are likely influencing this gender difference. There was mixed support for the third hypothesis – study 1 showed no specificity effects for either women nor men, and study 2 showed them only for men. These are interesting data that contribute to the growing literature on specificity effects on sexual response and will make a contribution to the literature. I have some questions and suggestions for improvement:

COMMENT:  We thank the reviewer for their kind comments and suggestions for improving the ms.

 

 Literature review:

I highly recommend that the authors read the more recent of Hyde’s meta-analyses when discussing gender effects on aspects of sexuality:

Petersen, J. L., & Hyde, J. S. (2010). A meta-analytic review of research on gender differences in sexuality, 1993–2007. Psychological bulletin, 136(1), 21.

 I also recommend the following for a more nuanced understanding of gender effects on sexual motivation:

 Dawson, S. J., & Chivers, M. L. (2014). Gender differences and similarities in sexual desire. Current Sexual Health Reports, 6, 211-219.

 

Attentional adhesion to sexual stimuli is thought to related to the hedonic value of sexual cues represented in those stimuli. How can the authors be sure that their sexual stimuli were of equal hedonic value for both women and men? Do you have any ratings demonstrating that women judged these stimuli as similarly attractive as men did? I raise this issue because the often-cited gender difference in sex drive may, instead, be considered a problem of low-incentive sexual cues coupled with more limited sexual opportunities (see Chivers & Blumenstock, 2024). The authors are encouraged to take and incentivemotivation perspective in considering the nature of their sexual stimuli and the effects on cognitive processing.

Chivers, M. L., & Blumenstock, S. M. (2024). Beyond Gendered/Sexed Sexual Response: Debunking Essentialism, Revisiting Experience, and Centering Women’s Sexual Pleasure. In Gender Resilience, Integration and Transformation (pp. 61-100). Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland.

 

COMMENT:  We thank the reviewer for this guidance. We have tried to address these points at various points in the ms and made reference to these studies, including a section in the Discussion termed “Nature of Sexual Stimuli”.

We did not originally take rating of the sexual attractiveness of the images used. However, in response to the important point raised by the reviewer we have now done so on a separate group. To summarise, the erotic images received highly similar rating from both men and women. The results are included in section 5.2. 

 

Later in the introduction the authors state:

“The majority of studies using the emotional distraction task to examine gender differences reviewed above have used erotic images that depicted both men and women (couples), and/or only the gender that the participant stated they sexually preferred. Hence, a clear distinction of their responses to their preferred and to their non-preferred gender is not possible from these studies.”

 This is not an accurate summary of the literature – there are many studies that have made comparisons between responses to sexual stimuli featuring only males and only females, such as:

Chivers, M. L., Seto, M. C., & Blanchard, R. (2007). Gender and sexual orientation differences in sexual response to sexual activities versus gender of actors in sexual films. Journal of personality and social psychology, 93(6), 1108.

 Spape, J., Timmers, A. D., Yoon, S., Ponseti, J., & Chivers, M. L. (2014). Genderspecific genital and subjective sexual arousal to prepotent sexual features in heterosexual women and men. Biological Psychology, 102, 1-9.

Micanovic, N., Timmers, A. D., & Chivers, M. L. (2021). Gender-specific genital and subjective sexual arousal to prepotent sexual stimuli in androphilic men and gynephilic women. The Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality, 30(3), 361-373.

 

COMMENT:  Our comment was aimed at studies that have used the emotional distraction task.  The studies cited by the reviewer did not use this technique but used stimuli that were presented for a “long” time (seconds) and recorded physiological responses.

 

 Methods: Can the authors explain their rationale for using stimuli that were not sexual for the female and male stimulus categories? From the description, it’s clear these were alluring images, but lacked frank depiction of sexual features. Why were those features not included? See later discussion of stimulus prepotency effects.

COMMENT:  We cover this issue in the section referred to above.

 

The authors should comment on the possible effects of seeing the stimuli twice, once during the consenting process and during the experiment. Did all participants review all sexual stimuli? Is it possible that some participants would look longer at some images than others during the consenting preview, influencing effects on the experiment?

COMMENT:  The images shown during the consenting process were a subset of the images used in the main experiment. All participants reviewed the same set of images. It is possible that this pre-exposure may have influenced the results in some manner (as suggested by the reviewer) but we have no way of knowing the effects of such influence.  It might also be noted that each images was shown more than once (three times in Experiment 1, four times in Experiment 2) during the experiments.  We have noted this limitation in the Discussion.  

 

 

Experiment 1 results:

The lack of gender difference in effect size for the sexual content induced delay needs more consideration – why is the gender difference more relevant than the equivalent effects size for women and men (actually, larger in women)? Could this be related to the overall slower RT for men? I expect that the lack of specificity effects in Study 1 relate to the male and female stimuli being only weakly hedonic – they need to be more frankly sexual to produce the effect.

COMMENT:  We attempted to explain this “paradox” (that the effect in ms is greater for men, but there is no gender difference when expressed in terms of effect size) by the idea that as the effect becomes “larger” this also increases the variance in a similar manner. This is equivalent to taking a distribution and “stretching it” so that the mean changes and the standard deviation changes in a proportional manner. Hence, there is a change in mean but no change in effect size (as this is the mean effect divided by the standard deviation).  We have rewritten this section to try and make our argument clearer.

We cover the issue of hedonic content elsewhere as described above.

 

 

Experiment 2 – Curious about the adjustments made to reduce the potential habituation effects. Why increase the number of neutral stimuli? Why was a reduction by trials in the frequency of sexual stimuli?

COMMENT:  The aim was to decrease the frequency of sexual images compared to neutral images. This can be done by increasing the number of neutral image trials. To keep the number of repetitions of each image the same, more neutral images were needed.

Previous research using other (non-sexual) emotional stimuli have shown that the impact of the emotional stimulus is greater when this is “rare” compared to “frequent” (Grimshaw, G. M., Kranz, L. S., Carmel, D., Moody, R. E., & Devue, C. (2018). Contrasting reactive and proactive control of emotional distraction. Emotion, 18(1), 26.). We have added a sentence on this issue.

 

 

Methods, Sample 2: What was the breakdown of Kinsey 0 to 1? There are interesting differences in sexual response patterns of Kinsey 0 and 1 women reported in

Chivers, M. L., Bouchard, K. N., & Timmers, A. D. (2015). Straight but not narrow; Within-gender variation in the gender-specificity of women’s sexual response. PloS one, 10(12), e0142575.

 Briefly, only Kinsey 0 women showed nonspecific sexual response; all other women showed greater response to female sexual stimuli.

COMMENT:  For experiment 1 the proportions were:  women 0:1 = 15:5 and men 15:3.  For experiment 2 these were: women 31:15 and men 52:9.

In light of these comments, we analysed (experiment 2 only due to very small numbers in experiment 1) to compare the effects of the male and female distraction effect between women who scored 0 or 1. There was a trend for women who scored 1 to have smaller effects for both male and female distractors (though far from statically significant). Hence, our data did not produce any signs of such a greater distraction effect to female stimuli in women scoring 0. However, our study was not designed to examine such an effect.

 

Methods: The authors wrote:

“Images were chosen from the IAPS and consisted of five images of males, five of females, and 20 neutral images (see Appendix 1).”

 This is confusing – were the IAPS images the neutral category images? Please clarify.

COMMENT:  All the images used in Experiment 2 were from the IAPs. We have rewritten this sentence to make this clearer. The images used and their source are all stated in the Appendix.

 

Discussion: Experiment 1 provides, to our knowledge, the first clear evidence for this effect (though see Wiemer et al. [29] for a similar result using a go-nogo task). It is of interest to speculate as to why previous studies have failed to demonstrate this result. Geer and Bellard [12] showed a clear gender effect but in the opposite direction.

Greater effects on men? But the authors also wrote in the results that the magnitude of the effect was similar for women and men; isn’t the latter the more valid index of the effect of sexual stimuli on a person’s attention? These data would suggest that the sexual stimuli are equally attention grabbing for women and men; overall men are simply slower responders in these tasks, and so that would explain the gender difference. The authors propose that the greater variability in men’s responses contribute to these effects -- what does the greater dispersion of men’s RTs mean?

COMMENT:  We hope we have dealt with this matter in a previous comment above. We also performed an additional test of this possible explanation by taking the ratio (instead of the difference).  We have added an additional sentence in the section in the Limitations where we discuss the problem of the men being slower overall in Experiment 1.

 

In female versus male stimuli – noting that no specificity effects were detected, discuss that stimuli are likely not potent enough – e.g., did not contain enough sexual cues. Speculate on effects if stimuli were more explicit.

I recommend that the authors develop their discussion of the sexual attractiveness of the images possible factors influencing outcomes in the current data:

see Timmers, A. D., Blumenstock, S. M., DeBruine, L., & Chivers, M. L. (2023). The role of attractiveness in gendered sexual response patterns. The Journal of Sex Research, 1-16.

 I believe the Timmers et al results also demonstrated category-specific effects for woman’s sexual response and deserve some discussion in this paper. The nature of the sexual stimuli in their study, and in the Spape et al study, being more sexually explicit and displaying “prepotent sexual features” needs greater consideration in this manuscript in relation to discussion of the nonspecificity of women’s SCID.

COMMENT:  We take these points together. We have now added a section in the Discuss about the prepotency of the images.

 

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The authors did a great job addressing my comments and the paper is substantially improved. There are no remaining major concerns.

Minor: Please check if the following sentence (p. 13, l. 540) is grammatically sound: "Reducing the duration of ...".

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Thanks for this responsive revision. I have no further coments