Human Motivation & Affective Neuroscience Lab
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Latest News: 6. December 2023

New picture-story measure of sexual motivation

Researchers at the HuMAN Lab have developed a new measure of sexual motivation that is based on content coding of picture stories. Hinzmann and colleagues (2023) and Schultheiss and colleagues (2023) have published two papers in Motivation Science in which they describe the development and validation of a measure that gauges a person’s current level of sexual motivation based on the imaginative stories the person writes about ambiguous pictures (e.g., a couple in bed engaged in a pillow fight). The new measure is valid in the sense that it responds sensitively to experimentally induced changes in sexual motivation, is associated with corresponding changes in subjective and physiological measures of affect, and predicts a behavioral criterion of sexual motivation (key-pressing for longer access to erotic images). Unlike many other measures of sexual motivation, it does not show a gender difference. The new measure of sexual motivation is based on a new approach of measure validation (see Figure 1) that builds on and extends earlier work by McClelland and colleagues.

psec example
Figure 1. (Motive) measure validation model employed in Hinzmann et al (2023) and Schultheiss et al (2023). Source: https://osf.io/nz2fr/


Previous releases:

Self-report and grid motive measures are measures of explicit motives and should not be used in tests of theories about implicit motives

Power-motivated people avoid angry faces

Are women more verbally fluent than men?

Discovery of a potential new indicator of pubertal hormone levels linked to human power motivation

What motivates you as an adult may depend on the hormones you were exposed to as a fetus

David Winter presents talk on the roots of war

Competition, aggression, and hormones

Women are more affiliation-motivated than men

Why the power-motivated are better at parking their cars

New meta-analysis: Low to no correlation between implicit and explicit motive measures

Content-coding motive measures can be approcimated with automated word counts

Exploiting the full potential of thematic apperception through profile analysis

High progesterone is associated with less coherent brains (August 2012)

What color naming speed reveals about the wisdom of one's goal choices (December 2010)

Are you high on testosterone and is that a good thing? Listen to Podcast of interview with Dr. Oliver Schultheiss on UM NewsService

New edited book on implicit motives available (October 2009)

What the word "not" may reveal about your ability to handle stress (October 2008)

Estrogen fuels female power (February 2008)

High-testosterone people reinforced by others’ anger, new study finds (February 2007)

Study finds US students more motivated to achieve, less power-hungry than German students (August 2006)

Are all people stressed out by a defeat or does it hurt some more than others? (April 2006)


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