The Importance of Partner Responsiveness for Experiencing Sexual Desire
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Intimately Connected: The Importance of Partner Responsiveness for Experiencing Sexual Desire
Article in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · July 2016
DOI: 10.1037/pspi0000069
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Gurit E Birnbaum
Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya
41 PUBLICATIONS 1,033 CITATIONS
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Moran Mizrahi
Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya
7 PUBLICATIONS 13 CITATIONS
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Yaniv Kanat-Maymon
Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya
38 PUBLICATIONS 613 CITATIONS
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Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Intimately Connected: The Importance of Partner Responsiveness for Experiencing Sexual Desire Gurit E. Birnbaum, Harry T. Reis, Moran Mizrahi, Yaniv Kanat-Maymon, Omri Sass, and Chen Granovski-Milner Online First Publication, July 11, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000069
CITATION Birnbaum, G. E., Reis, H. T., Mizrahi, M., Kanat-Maymon, Y., Sass, O., & Granovski-Milner, C. (2016, July 11). Intimately Connected: The Importance of Partner Responsiveness for Experiencing Sexual Desire. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Advance online publication. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000069
Intimately Connected: The Importance of Partner Responsiveness for Experiencing Sexual Desire
Gurit E. Birnbaum Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya
Harry T. Reis University of Rochester
Moran Mizrahi and Yaniv Kanat-Maymon Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya
Omri Sass Cornell Tech
Chen Granovski-Milner Bar-Ilan University
Sexual desire tends to subside gradually over time, with many couples failing to maintain desire in their long-term relationships. Three studies employed complementary methodologies to examine whether partner responsiveness, an intimacy-building behavior, could instill desire for one’s partner. In Study 1, participants were led to believe that they would interact online with their partner. In reality, they interacted with either a responsive or an unresponsive confederate. In Study 2, participants interacted face-to-face with their partner, and judges coded their displays of responsiveness and sexual desire. Study 3 used a daily experiences methodology to examine the mechanisms underlying the responsiveness– desire linkage. Overall, responsiveness was associated with increased desire, but more strongly in women. Feeling special and perceived partner mate value explained the responsiveness–desire link, suggesting that responsive partners were seen as making one feel valued as well as better potential mates for anyone and thus as more sexually desirable.
Keywords: gender differences, mate value, responsiveness, romantic relationships, sexual desire
Sexual desire is among the strongest forces in human nature— one that may induce overwhelming pleasures and intensely mean- ingful experiences or profound yearning and disappointment. As such, it plays a major role not only in attracting potential partners to each other but also in promoting an enduring bond between them. Indeed, the absence of sexual desire, which is prevalent in both subclinical samples and clinical practice (e.g., Laumann,
Gagnon, Michael, & Michaels, 1994; Rosen, 2000), has long been considered as an important index of disrupted relational harmony (Kaplan, 1979; Leiblum & Rosen, 1988), depriving relationships of intimacy (McCarthy, Bodnar, & Handal, 2004) and often lead- ing to breakup and divorce (e.g., Regan, 2000). It is therefore of little surprise that both clinicians and researchers have searched for effective strategies to prevent against the waning of sexual desire in long-term relationships (e.g., McCarthy & Farr, 2012; Muise, Impett, Kogan, & Desmarais, 2013).
Because sex is a prominent pathway through which people seek a sense of felt understanding and caring (Birnbaum & Reis, 2006), it is easy to understand why scholars have acknowledged the contribution of intimacy-related processes to sexual desire. How- ever, the relevant literature has been largely based on clinical impressions rather than systematic research (see review by Fer- reira, Narciso, & Novo, 2012). Furthermore, findings from the few studies that have focused on the intimacy–desire linkage (e.g., Birnbaum, Cohen, & Wertheimer, 2007; McCabe, 1997; Patton & Waring, 1985) are hard to interpret because of several method- ological issues, such as the use of correlational designs, which preclude causal conclusions about the link between intimacy and the desire for sex, and the possibility of motivated distortion in participants’ reports of sensitive topics like sexual desire (de Jong & Reis, 2015). To be sure, no prior research examining the intimacy–desire link has used an experimental manipulation of intimacy displays or has assessed behavioral expressions of sexual desire, which would rule out a motivated construal process expla-
Gurit E. Birnbaum, Baruch Ivcher School of Psychology, Interdisciplin- ary Center (IDC) Herzliya; Harry T. Reis, Department of Clinical and Social Sciences in Psychology, University of Rochester; Moran Mizrahi and Yaniv Kanat-Maymon, Baruch Ivcher School of Psychology, Interdis- ciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya; Omri Sass, Jacobs Institute, Cornell Tech; Chen Granovski-Milner, Department of Psychology, Bar-Ilan University.
This research was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (Grant 86/10 awarded to Gurit E. Birnbaum) and by the Binational Science Foundation (Grant 2011381 awarded to Gurit E. Birnbaum and Harry T. Reis). We thank Noam Segal, Reut Bivas, May Recanati, Romi Orr, Or Dvir, Amit Ben-Zvi, Efrat Na’aman, Sapir Damti, Shiran Halavi, Adi Harel, Noa Hoss, Sivan Got, Michal Gazit, Adi Manvich, Yulia Bogdanov, Yuval Gilad, Zach Gerber, Maya Trajtenberg, Gal Lazarovich, Lital Lib- erty, and Shir Kogan for their assistance in the collection and coding of the data.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Gurit E. Birnbaum, Baruch Ivcher School of Psychology, Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya, P.O. Box 167, Herzliya 46150, Israel. E-mail: birnbag@ gmail.com
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