Expression of feelings and sexual function : the mediating role of sexual self-disclosure in a heterosexual sample

• Autor(a) principal: Sukhanova, Anna
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10437/11971
• topic: MESTRADO EM PSICOLOGIA CLÍNICA E DA SAÚDE; PSICOLOGIA; SEXUALIDADE; INTIMIDADE; SENTIMENTOS; GÉNERO; PSYCHOLOGY; SEXUALITY; INTIMACY; FEELINGS; GENDER

While much of the current literature focused on associations that exist between individual factors of sexual health, namely sexual function, little is known about the role that relational predictors play in sexual function of an individual. In the current study, we aimed to gain more insight into how expression of feelings and sexual self-disclosure might potentially affect sexual function of individuals testing a mediation model. A total of 564 cis-gendered, heterosexual male and female participants was recruited. Any participant who did not fill an item from one of the scales of interest and all atypical values were excluded from the research. Thus, the final sample consisted of 492 cases, of which 170 were men (34,55%) and 322 were women (65,44%) aged 18-74 years involved in a dyadic exclusive, committed relationship. To compare the variables of interest, T-tests for independent samples and one-way MANOVA were applied. To test the association between variables, Pearson’s bivariate correlation tests were used. The data revealed a significant overall effect of expression of feelings on sexual function. The results proved that sexual self-disclosure mediates the relationship between expression of feelings and sexual function as these variables are positively and significantly correlated. Upon the examination of gender-related findings, the results showed significant differences in the level of expression of feelings between men and women, with women having higher mean values, however, the data did not reveal any statistically significant difference in mean values of sexual self-disclosure between men and women. We also found that gender does not moderate either the trajectory in the relation between expression of feelings and sexual self-disclosure nor the trajectory between sexual self-disclosure and sexual function.