Mortality Salience Increases Subjective Sexual Responsiveness: Preliminary Findings

According to terror management theory, making individuals consciously aware of their own death (mortality salience) triggers various responses to overcome the existential anxiety that the awareness of death causes. Common responses include striving for self-esteem, enhancing identification with cultural worldviews, and hostility to those who challenge one’s worldviews. Also, some studies give indirect support for the notion that mortality salience may facilitate sexual responsiveness as a way to buffer death anxiety; e.g., mortality salience increases desire to be close to a romantic partner and perceived attractiveness of a newly met opposite-sex person. Thus, our aim was to test if mortality salience increases sexual desire and arousal in a laboratory setting. 144 Portuguese (105 women) were recruited from the local university participant pool. After reporting their baseline level of sexual desire and arousal, participants were assigned to either a mortality salience condition or a control condition. Afterwards, they watched an excerpt of a romantic movie showing the initial emotional involvement between a man and a woman, and reported the level of sexual desire and arousal they felt while watching it.