The Multiple Roles of Emotion in Interpretation and Memory of Sexual Consent (original) (raw)
Related papers
2019
Data for a study accepted in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied Abstract Participants conflate consent and wantedness when judging situations as rape (Peterson & Muehlenhard, 2007). Pleasure might also affect how such situations might be appraised by victims, perpetrators, and jurors. In four experiments, participants read vignettes describing sexual encounters that were consensual or not, wanted or unwanted, and pleasurable or not pleasurable. Participants judged whether they thought each situation described rape and how distressing they thought the encounter would be. Wantedness affected perceived distress when consent was given. Wantedness and pleasure also influenced whether participants considered the situation rape in non-consensual scenarios. In additional experiments, we analysed the results by gender, manipulated perspective (being the subject or initiator of the encounter), levels of aggression, and compared the results to a group of participants who had viewed an...
Rerick et al 2022 Let’s just do it: sexual arousal’s effects on attitudes regarding sexual consent
Journal of Social Psychology, 2022
Misperception of others’ sexual willingness or consent is widely considered to contribute to sexual coercion. Sexual arousal is commonly present among those in situations with potential to result in sexual assault. The current research tests the effects of sexual arousal on related attitudes: including those toward token resistance, assertive sexual strategies, and affirmative consent. Sexual arousal was primed through a narrative writing paradigm. Results indicate sexual arousal led all participants to be more likely to endorse belief in female token resistance, and led women to more strongly endorse men’s assertive sexual strategies. Implications for research on sexual consent are discussed.
Memory for pictures of sexual assault: Sensitive maintenance of ambiguous stimuli
PLoS ONE, 2020
Individual differences in dispositional coping might influence how ambiguous situations involving interactions of men and women are interpreted and remembered. Specifically, we hypothesized that women with a sensitive coping style actively maintain ambiguously threatening stimuli in their memory, showing so-called sensitive maintenance. As a prerequisite to investigate this hypothesis, two surveys (Studies 1 and 2; N = 151 and N = 252) were conducted to answer the questions whether fear of sexual assault is of relevance for young women in Germany and whether ambiguous (rather than only unambiguously threatening) situations are experienced to a significant extent. After confirming this for our target population, our main hypothesis was tested in Study 3 (N = 192) by combining tasks assessing the appraisal and the forgetting of nonthreatening, threatening, and ambiguous pictures showing interactions of men and women, and by varying the cognitive load during the retention interval. Whe...
Remembering Disputed Sexual Encounters: A New Frontier for Witness Memory Research
Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology, 2015
This paper reviews sources of distortion in memory for sexual encounters, particularly those between intoxicated participants. We review factors leading to initial misinterpretations of sexual consent including the indirect nature of sexual consent communications, misleading cultural sexual scripts, misinterpretation of passivity, and others. In this context, we consider the way in which alcohol can both contribute to initial misunderstanding and promote specific distortions in memory over time. Finally, we discuss additional influences on memory, including motivations related to self-esteem, self-concept maintenance, or litigation, and the effects of social influence from sources such as friends, forensic interviewers or therapists.
Unwanted sexual experiences are seldom acknowledged as ''rape.'' These are identity-threatening events that cause negative affect and cognitive confusion. According to affect control theory, such events produce deflection that is resolved through restorative acts, redefini-tion of behavior, or modification or redefinition of identities. Since deflection reduction is an underspecified aspect of the theory, we employ theories of power dependence to better understand these processes. Using a mixed method approach, we qualitatively analyze 115 narratives about unwanted sexual experiences, finding respondents framed events in ways that protect the other person or their own self-meanings. We use closed-ended survey data to simulate women's experiences in Interact, affect control theory's predictive software, to demonstrate how event reframings reduce deflection. Finally, we estimate regressions to predict how power dependence and other relational contexts influence responses to unwanted sexual experiences.