Tip: click a paragraph to jump to the exact moment in the video. Sexualizing Anxiety and Anxiolytic Sex: Misattribution of Arousal

1. 00:03 Have you guys heard of misattribution of arousal?
2. 00:10 No. Has any of you heard of arousal?
3. 00:16 Of course you have. You’re watching me online. Nothing more arousing than Sam
4. 00:22 Vaknin, the author of malignant self-love, narcissism revisited, and on top of that, a professor of psychology roving in the wilds of Paris.
5. 00:35 Today, we’re going to discuss the connection between anxiety and sexual arousal. Now, on the face of it, anxiety
6. 00:43 is the opposite of sexual arousal. Who can think of sex when they’re anxious? And vice versa, when you are in the
7. 00:50 throws of orgasmic sex, the last thing on on your mind is anxiety. But that is
8. 00:56 that would be completely wrong. Anxiety can be misidentified,
9. 01:02 misattributed as sexual arousal. Very often we feel anxiety, but we don’t realize it’s anxiety.
10. 01:14 this there’s a general malaise a general sense of discomfort an ominous undertone
11. 01:21 something in the offing in the horizon a threat that is diffused and ambient we can’t place our finger on it this is
12. 01:28 known as generalized or diffused anxiety it’s a very common condition in healthy
13. 01:34 people it’s temporary and transient in people with anxiety disorders it’s everlasting it’s constantly there but
14. 01:42 this type of anxiety is often ignored
15. 01:48 u denied. There is it does not garner the attention it deserves. It’s not labeled properly and then it can be misidentified as sexual arousal. It can
16. 02:00 be eroticized. So the person with this kind of anxiety might say, “I’m actually sexually
17. 02:08 aroused by this or that person or by the circumstances or by this porn movie that I’m watching. I’m sexually aroused.” When in reality, what’s happening is there’s an underlying anxiety. And this is what is known as misattribution of
18. 02:24 arousal. when one effect or one state of mind is misidentified as sexual arousal.
19. 02:34 But it goes both ways. If you’re in the habit of misidentifying your identity as sexual arousal, you would also tend to
20. 02:42 misidentify your sexual arousal as anxiety. Whenever you’re sexually aroused, you would feel for some reason
21. 02:50 anxious as if something really bad is going to happen. Some premonition, some anticipation of a catastrophe. You would catastrophize sexual arousal. And in
22. 03:01 this sense, sexual arousal can be anxio anxioenic, can be misidentified as
23. 03:07 anxiety. And this misidentification would lead to the emergence of real anxiety. Sexual arousal can bring on
24. 03:15 anxiety. Exactly the way that anxiety can be misidentified as sexual arousal. It goes both ways. But sex can be anxolytic. Sex has the capacity to reduce anxiety.
25. 03:33 And so this creates a hall of mirrors. The initial diffused generalized anxiety
26. 03:40 is misattributed to sexual arousal. you you misidentify your anxiety. You
27. 03:46 say, “I’m actually sexually aroused. Let me have sex.” And then you have sex and your anxiety
28. 03:53 is gone. It’s anxolytic. So this leads you to believe that your
29. 03:59 initial identification of of the situation as sexually sexual arousal has
30. 04:05 been correct that there has no there’s has been no involvement of anxiety.
31. 04:11 So the anxiety remains hidden, remains occult, remains behind the scenes
32. 04:18 because sexual arousal often leads to actual acts of sex, including masturbation. Doesn’t have to be sex with someone else. So the sequence is anxiety
33. 04:31 disguised camouflaged as sexual arousal sex or sex act that reduces the anxiety
34. 04:40 to the point that it vanishes and then you’re able to say this has all been about sex. This has all been about sexual arousal that has led to sex. There’s no anxiety involved which of
35. 04:52 course is wrong. Even gender roles are connected to anxiety. We know that gender roles are performative and they are intimately connected
36. 05:03 through sexual scripts to the sex act and to sexual arousal. So even gender roles are connected to anxiety. In some situations, masculinity is anxioenic. Masculinity induces
37. 05:16 anxiety via the expression, verbalization or externalization of aggression. Aggression is often identified with masculinity. So masculinity brings on anxiety.
38. 05:28 Femininity in these conditions is anxolytic. It reduces the anxiety. There are other situations where it’s exactly the opposite. The feminine side or femininity generates anxiety and it takes masculinity to calm it calm the
39. 05:45 situation down to reduce the anxiety. So, but be that as it may, and again it
40. 05:52 depends crucially on the circumstances, on the environment, on other people and so on. But be that as it may, generals are always associated with anxiety.
41. 06:04 There’s anxiety communicated, anxiety generated, and anxiety reduced and amilarated. What about the narcissist? The narcissist is sexually attracted to
42. 06:16 himself or herself. The narcissist is auto has auto arousal auto erotism. The
43. 06:24 nar the narcissist is aroused by himself or herself.
44. 06:30 And this translates to diffuse generalized anxiety. In case of misattribution of arousal, when the narcissist gets aroused, it creates anxiety. So the narcissist’s autoerotic impulses, the narcissist’s sexual attraction to
45. 06:48 himself or to or to herself would go hand in hand with a general atmosphere
46. 06:55 of diffuse anxiety with a general ambiencece of anxiety with masturbation
47. 07:02 as the only anxolysis. Masturbation is the only act able to reduce the anxiety
48. 07:10 to diffuse to diffuse it. And the connection between anxiety and sexual arousal is one example of misattribution
49. 07:18 is of arousal. It’s when people mistakenly assume that
50. 07:27 um whatever is happening to them is causing them to feel aroused.
51. 07:35 Um they people find themselves in various situations
52. 07:41 and they have physiological changes. They have emotional changes.
53. 07:48 They have even cognitive uh processes going on. They can’t explain these things and then they say well I must be sexually aroused. And that is the misattribution of arousal. this process of misidentification when you when people actually experience
54. 08:06 physiological responses related for example to fear or to exertion.
55. 08:13 People mislabel these responses as romantic arousal. Physiological symptoms
56. 08:19 may be attributed to incorrect stimuli because many stimuli have similar physiological symptoms and background. So when your blood pressure shoots up, when you experience shortness of breath, when
57. 08:35 your heart rate climb climbs, when when all these changes happen, they can be attributed either to some physiological condition, underlying physiological condition, takodia,
58. 08:47 one example, or they can be attributed to some psychological process, uh
59. 08:54 emotional dysregulation, some um being overwhelmed by some by by arousal and so
60. 09:00 on. So people often conflate the two when they have physiological things happening. They misattribute them to
61. 09:08 some emotional state and they misidentify physiological arousal with mental
62. 09:14 arousal especially sexual arousal. One of the initial studies that looked into
63. 09:20 this phenomenon was conducted by Shakar and Singer in 1962. It was based on the idea that the experience of arousal could be ambiguous and therefore misattributed to an
64. 09:32 incorrect stimulus. So the researchers developed what came to be known as a two factor theory of
65. 09:39 emotion and misattribution of arousal um is an influence on emotion processing.
66. 09:46 It’s like an interruption in the transition between factor one to factor two in the generation of an emotion.
67. 09:54 And mis misidentification or misattribution of arousal is common in situations which
68. 10:03 are unusual. I mentioned for example exertion. I mentioned physiological medical um
69. 10:11 conditions such as takalia but also in dating romantic situations exercise
70. 10:20 um in all these conditions where the body’s physiological equilibrium and
71. 10:26 homeostasis is impacted. It is easy to misidentify these physiological changes
72. 10:32 as if they’re emanating from some external stimulus. for example, an attractive woman.
73. 10:40 The possible effects of misattribution of arousal is numerous. One of the most
74. 10:47 famous is when you perceive a potential partner as more attractive than he or she is because of a heightened state of physiological stress.
75. 10:58 And u this is also common with alcohol. that alcohol consumption of alcohol is
76. 11:04 an imp direct impact on certain structures in the brain. So alcohol doesn’t cause a misattribution of
77. 11:11 arousal. There’s a study by White and others in 1981 investigated this
78. 11:17 phenomenon and found that people in an unrelated aroused state will rate an
79. 11:23 attractive uh woman or men more highly than others who are not aroused. So you
80. 11:32 could be aroused by something completely unrelated, completely unrelated. You just climbed
81. 11:38 stairs, many stairs or you exerted yourself somehow. you exercise or you consumed a lot of heavy food or so you’re aroused in the physiological sense or you’re even aroused in the
82. 11:50 mental sense you’ve had a fight with someone or whatever and this state of arousal which has nothing to do with
83. 11:56 sexuality nothing to do with sex nothing to do with ro romance nothing to do with intimacy is misattributed and you’re going to say wow this person
84. 12:08 is so attractive so so dropped gorgeous. I wish I could have sex with her. And
85. 12:15 the sexual arousal is a secondary derivative phenomenon which is intended to disguise and camouflage the real sources of arousal.
86. 12:26 For example, the fear. You could therefore say that misattribution of arousal is an attempt to reduce anxiety
87. 12:34 by converting it into something pleasurable and also socially acceptable. So there
88. 12:42 there is an attempt to sublimate negative effects such as fear or um
89. 12:51 physiological situations which are potentially threatening like an increase in heart rate or increase in blood
90. 12:58 pressure. There’s an attempt to exit this environment of threat, this environment of fear, this environment of effort and stress and to convert all
91. 13:09 these into a type of arousal that is rewarding and pleasurable, dopamineergic
92. 13:16 and sought after and socially acceptable. It’s a recasting or reframing that is
93. 13:23 done unconsciously by the body itself. It’s like the body says you’re afraid
94. 13:29 now. To be afraid is not pleasant. I don’t want to be afraid. I’m anxious about being afraid. So I will not call it fear. I will call it sexual arousal.
95. 13:40 Okay. So I’m sexually aroused. But to whom? Who? Who is the one who is sexually
96. 13:46 attracting? Ah this woman. Ah this man. So the attract it’s the attraction
97. 13:52 that’s there not the specific attractive person. The researchers in in white also found that uh people who are aroused
98. 14:05 would dislike an unattractive person more than those without arousal. So it
99. 14:13 it goes both way because there’s a desperate need to justify the lie the selfdeception that it’s sexual arousal. You need to be in the presence of attractive people in order to explain to
100. 14:24 yourself why you are sexually aroused. So the sequence is this. There’s fear or unpleasant emotion, negative affair,
101. 14:32 some physiological threatening state of the body. You convert it into the belief
102. 14:38 or into the misattribution into the selfdeception. You lie to yourself that you’re actually being sexually aroused.
103. 14:45 But it’s very difficult to lie to yourself if you’re surrounded by unattractive people. And so you would
104. 14:51 resent the presence of unattractive people. You would be angry at them and you would dislike them. And this is
105. 14:58 exactly what we found in studies. The mistaken attribution of a fast heart
106. 15:04 rate ticardia for sexual arousal is a recognized phenomenon in psychology.
107. 15:12 So many emotional states uh create as I said similar
108. 15:19 physiological responses. So it’s easy to confuse them. If you rely only on your physiological responses as an indicator,
109. 15:26 if the only way you can identify emotions and label them is by listening to your body, you’re in trouble because
110. 15:33 the multiplicity of emotional states and effects and so on and cognitions produce the same physiological symptoms and
111. 15:40 signs and it’s very difficult to tell tell them apart. So this kind of person would misinterpret an accelerated heart rate caused by one stimulus like fear,
112. 15:51 anxiety, exercise, exertion as sexual attraction towards another person.
113. 15:58 The misinterpretation as I said is based on what came to be known as a two factor theory of emotion. The theory states that an emotional experience is composed of two parts. physiological arousal, physical reaction of some kind like change in heart rate or blood pressure
114. 16:15 or vasoddilation or any any change in in physiological parameter followed by a
115. 16:23 cognitive label. Cognitive label is when the brain is trying to interpret what um
116. 16:29 uh what is the physical reaction based on what’s the context of the phys physiological reaction. Like the brain
117. 16:36 spots the physiological reaction and asks itself why is this happening to me and then it’s easy to get a wrong answer. It’s easy to mislabel cognitively mislabel
118. 16:48 the emotion and say well I’m actually uh sexually aroused or I’m romantically
119. 16:54 aroused you know I’m falling in love I’m getting infatuated or state of limrance and so on.
120. 17:02 If a person experiences a fast heart rate, which is physiological arousal, and that person attributes it to the
121. 17:08 person they’re with rather than the true cause, um
122. 17:15 that that kind of misattribution could lead to very problematic uh outcomes and untoward consequences. If you are in a
123. 17:26 if you’re stressful, if you’re in a stressful or anxietyinducing situation,
124. 17:32 and instead of labeling it correctly, coping with the underlying problems that
125. 17:38 have yielded it, avoiding the catastrophizing, reducing, amilarating, mitigating the anxiety somehow, maybe
126. 17:45 even uh with medication. If you deny the anxiety completely, repress it, relabel
127. 17:51 it wrongly, reframe it and say, “No, I’m I’m not anxious. I’m sexually attracted.
128. 17:57 I’m sexually aroused. I’m I’m I’m romantically attracted to this this person.” This could lead to modes of sexual behavior and romantic behavior
129. 18:10 which are highly compulsive, coercive, and potentially illegal.
130. 18:17 Because if the only way for you to reduce your anxiety, the only anxolysis, the only anxolytic
131. 18:25 method is to fall in love with someone or to have sex with someone, uh to get
132. 18:31 infatuated with someone, you would develop a stalkish personality. you
133. 18:37 would become very creepy because that’s the only way for you to feel it is calm and composed and
134. 18:44 restored somehow. Many medical conditions cause
135. 18:50 misattribution. That’s a it’s a widespread problem. uh inappropriate sinus tachicardia,
136. 18:59 postural orthostatic tachicardia syndrome, ventricular ticardia all of them have been connected to associated with or connected to um uh
137. 19:10 misattribution of arousal. Um so how would you know if you’re if your
138. 19:17 arousal is real or at the very least normal? How would you know that your arousal is not a constant state of
139. 19:25 disguising anxiety? How could you tell? Well,
140. 19:31 um you need to monitor your body. You need to talk to your body and you need to get to know your body really really well. Uh
141. 19:42 take for example tahicia. If your rapid heartbeat occurs without
142. 19:48 any physical or emotional trigger, no clear cause,
143. 19:55 uh if the symptoms are persistent, the fast heart rate lasts for an unusual
144. 20:01 duration or continues long after some kind of excitement or exertion has subsided.
145. 20:07 If other symptoms are present, the takicardia is accompanied by other signs such as dizziness, shortness of breath,
146. 20:13 fatigue. If this creates distress and and fear um anxiety, avoidance of
147. 20:20 actually sexual activity and so on so forth, we are probably talking about a physiological state. If you uh
148. 20:29 experience a rapid heartbeat time and again, it can’t be that you are
149. 20:35 attracted to people time and again. It’s probably something medical. You need to look into it. Sexual arousal is more rare than you know. Romantic arousal is even rarer.
150. 20:49 So if this happens to you like 20 times a day every time your heartbeat goes up or your blood pressure goes up or
151. 20:55 whatever or you become dizzy or fatigued exerted and you constantly
152. 21:02 convert it into sexual arousal, then what you’re doing is you’re just disguising the underlying medical
153. 21:09 condition. Now I’d like to review a few of a few of the studies and experiments conducted starting by the seminal study Daton and Aaron study
154. 21:22 titled some evidence for heightened sexual attraction under conditions of high anxiety published in the journal of
155. 21:28 personality and social psychology. The study showed that this the study was
156. 21:35 conducted on male male participants with female female confederates, female
157. 21:41 collaborators. So more males contacted the female experimentter when they had just walked down a suspension bridge. So there was a female
158. 21:53 Confederate at the end of a suspension bridge and that female Confederate Confederate
159. 22:00 was willing and a and and able to give out her phone number. When men crossed the suspension bridge, they tended to ask for the phone number in much higher
160. 22:11 numbers when they crossed a regular sturdy bridge. The suspension bridge
161. 22:17 created suspense, created fear, created anxiety, which was then misinterpreted,
162. 22:25 which were then misinterpreted as sexual arousal. And the men ask for the phone number much more often than men who
163. 22:32 crossed a normal regular bridge. Because these men who cross the suspension bridge misattributed their arousal. They believed that they were feeling sexual arousal at the sight of the female
164. 22:46 instead of feeling the leftover physiological arousal from the fear of walking across the suspension bridge.
165. 22:53 The researchers said that men found the watt attractive when they had more
166. 22:59 anxiety about crossing the bridge. A bridge that induced anxiety
167. 23:05 also created a misattribution of arousal and the men asked for the phone number
168. 23:11 of the female confederate. A bridge that did not create anxiety because it was not swaying with the winds. Yeah. Did not create anxiety. The men did not ask
169. 23:22 for the phone number or ask for it rarely. There were no significant differences on either bridge. when the
170. 23:29 researchers used a male confederate to instead of a female confederate. So
171. 23:36 clearly the the misinterpret the misinterpreted arousal was sexual in
172. 23:42 nature. We already mentioned Shakar and Singer’s 1962 study titled cognitive, social and physiological determinance of emotional state in psychological review.
173. 23:54 And they found that if someone was physiologically aroused without being aware of it, they would attribute their arousal to a recent thought in their memory. So it’s not always converted
174. 24:05 into sexual arousal. Sometimes the brain desperately tries to connect a state of anxiety or
175. 24:12 physiological arousal to the most recent thought or the most recent memory or
176. 24:19 even the most recent emotion. Researchers also found that emotions in
177. 24:25 this particular study they they focused on euphoria and anger. They found that emotions could be manipulated by
178. 24:31 providing a participant with a shot of a pineophrine and so adrenaline. So when
179. 24:37 they injected adrenaline uh there was arousal physiological arousal which was immediately misinterpreted as um either
180. 24:44 anger or euphoria and whether whether the arousal was labeled anger or labeled
181. 24:50 euphoria could be could be influenced by other people it’s pretty shocking the
182. 24:56 there was a determination of the emotional state from the outside on condition that an underlying
183. 25:03 physiological arousal state was there was present Another study by Sevitzki Medvek
184. 25:10 Charlton Gilovich and others titled in 1998 was titled what me worry arousal
185. 25:17 misattribution and the effect of temporal distance on confidence was published in personality and social
186. 25:23 psychology bulletin they discovered that misattribution of arousal can also influence how much confidence one feels before completing a task. The famous study by White Fishbine, Rashstein and and others titled
187. 25:39 passionate love and the misattribution of arousal was published in the journal of personality and social psychology.
188. 25:45 And it found that regardless of the stimulized polarity, if the stimulus was
189. 25:51 positive, stimulus was negative, stimulus was neutral, doesn’t m didn’t
190. 25:57 matter. Regardless of the polarity, the participants in the aroused state found
191. 26:03 the attractive confederate woman more attractive and the unattractive confederate woman as
192. 26:10 less attractive than the unaroused participants. So the unaroused participants were closer to the truth in judging attractiveness whereas the
193. 26:21 aroused participants exaggerated the attractiveness and exaggerated the unattractiveness regardless of whether the stimulus that had created the physiological arousal was neutral, positive or negative.
194. 26:38 Loftess and Ross in November 1974 wrote the article effects of
195. 26:44 misattribution of arousal upon the acquisition and extinction of a conditioned emotional response. It was
196. 26:50 published in the journal of personality and social psychology and they suggested that misattribution procedures can
197. 26:57 change physiological response to a condition source of fear or arousal. In
198. 27:04 other words, as I said earlier in this video, misattribution changes the relationship, the interaction,
199. 27:11 the response to a conditioned source of fear and arousal. Self-perception and
200. 27:17 attribution played a major role in emotional response. And finally, I would
201. 27:24 like to discuss a study by Alan Kendrick Linda McCall and others 1989 titled
202. 27:30 arousal and attraction a response facilitation alternative to misattribution and negative reinforcement models. It’s a study that kind of revolutionized the field. They will understand in a minute why.
203. 27:43 So all the previous studies and the two factor model uh of emotions and so on
204. 27:49 they all said that um um you need to be unaware
205. 27:57 of the true cause of the arousal in order to misattribute it. Misattribution
206. 28:04 of arousal is because we don’t know why the arousal is happening. We don’t know what has caused the arousal. the ethology of the causation.
207. 28:15 These authors suggested that regardless of whether a person was aware of the
208. 28:21 true cause of the arousal, they were still more attracted to the target person than those in the control condition. In other words, you had three groups. Basically,
209. 28:33 two of the groups were aroused. One group didn’t know why the arousal
210. 28:39 occurred. didn’t know the source of the physiological arousal. One group knew
211. 28:45 the source of the they knew that the physiological arousal is because of exertion or
212. 28:51 exercise or injection of epinephrine or whatever. They knew the cause and the third group were controlled.
213. 28:57 They were not aroused at all. So aroused without cause, aroused with cause, no
214. 29:04 arousal. And uh they discovered that both aroused groups, even the group that
215. 29:12 knew why they are being aroused, both groups misjudged attractiveness,
216. 29:19 both groups were attracted to the target person, the confederate woman or or men. They they were attracted unusually so. and they mislabeled and misattributed their arousal to the
217. 29:31 attraction. Even when they knew, even when they knew that it’s not true, even when they knew that the cause of the arousal is something completely different, they still tended to deceive
218. 29:42 themselves and to lie to themselves that they are being sexually aroused. I explained why earlier because there was
219. 29:48 a need to convert um potentially threatening situation, a catastrophizing situation into a pleasurable situation, a reward centered
220. 29:59 situation which would be anxolytic would reduce anxiety. So they come up with
221. 30:05 another model, new model and they call it the response facilitation model. The
222. 30:11 response facilitation model states that it is possible that people could be aware of the true cause of arousal and
223. 30:18 still find themselves misattributing, still find themselves attracted to someone compared to people who are unaroused and still lie to themselves that this concocted
224. 30:30 attraction is the reason that they are aroused even though they know better, even though they know it’s not true.
225. 30:36 This demonstrates another potential model that could explain the attraction arousal component of the misattribution
226. 30:42 of arousal theory. So coming back full circle, next time
227. 30:49 you’re sexually aroused, ask yourself, have I done anything to change my physiological parameters? Have I been have I just been exercising or exerting myself or do I have an
228. 31:02 underlying medical condition? So when you’re sexually aroused, question the reasons for your arousal.
229. 31:09 Ask yourself as well, am I anxious about something? Am I catastrophizing something? Am I worried and concerned
230. 31:16 about something? And then there’s some some chance, and it’s not a small chance
231. 31:23 that you’re converting negative effects, catastrophizing anxiety,
232. 31:29 and physiological signals from the body which appear to be threatening. You’re converting all these into something more
233. 31:36 pleasurable and rewarding like sexual anxiety. But that’s a misattribution. You’re deceiving yourself. You’re lying to yourself. Anxiety can be misidentified as sexual arousal and eroticize in order to camouflage and disguise the ominous, menacing um
234. 31:52 undertones and overtones of the real cause. Remember that. Remember also that
235. 31:58 sexual arousal can create anxiety. So next time you’re sexually aroused,
236. 32:04 you’re attracted to someone romantically or physically and immediately you’re flooded with
237. 32:10 anxiety, it’s because you’re misidentifying the arousal as anxiety. Anxiety is not real. It’s not
238. 32:16 performance anxiety. Simply, it’s simply the constant association of sexual
239. 32:22 arousal and anxiety going the wrong way, going the other way. Do not use sex to
240. 32:28 reduce your anxiety. If you make sense sex your prefer
241. 32:34 preferred anxiety medication, if you self-medicate with sex in order to reduce your anxiety and depression, your
242. 32:42 sexual behavior and romantic behavior would become stalkish, compulsive,
243. 32:49 creepy, threatening, unpleasant, and uh could get you in in hot waters,
244. 32:56 in trouble if you overdo it. Remember the gender roles are intimately
245. 33:03 connected with sex, sexuality and as equally intimately connected with
246. 33:09 anxiety. Don’t overplay your masculinity or femininity because it might induce
247. 33:15 anxiety. Uh always ask yourself what is really happening there. Stand back.
248. 33:26 Think for a minute what is really happening there. And only if you believe that you got the answers straight, 100%
249. 33:33 go for it. Especially if the other party is truly attractive.
250. 33:40 Happy arousal.