The respondent conditioning of male sexual arousal.
Half-second pairings can condition male sexual arousal, giving you a lab model for both increase and decrease procedures.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team worked with adult men in a lab. They paired a brief tone with an adult film clip.
The gap between tone and film was only half a second. This short delay is key for respondent conditioning.
What they found
After many pairings, the tone alone raised penile size. Backward or random pairings did nothing.
The result shows a simple classical-conditioning effect on sexual arousal.
How this fits with other research
Azrin et al. (1969) got monkeys to release epinephrine to a tone paired with shock. Both studies prove respondent conditioning can hook a neutral cue to a strong body response.
Wetherington (1979) used the opposite move. He saturated two men with long masturbation to deviant fantasies and saw their arousal drop. Webb et al. (1999) adds the flip side: pairing can raise arousal, satiation can lower it.
Leaf et al. (2012) showed shock timing changes behavior. J et al. used timing too, but aimed at arousal, not response rate. Same lab logic, new target.
Why it matters
If you run arousal-reduction programs, remember the mechanism works both ways. Short, forward pairing can boost a cue, while satiation or extinction can shrink it. Check the timing in your protocol—half-second gaps build links, random gaps break them.
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Review your pairing procedure: keep the CS-US gap under one second or switch to random order to weaken the link.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
The respondent (classical) conditioning of male sexual arousal was investigated, employing penile plethysmography and 2 control procedures. Nine participants participated in three sessions, for three consecutive weeks. Each session consisted of fifteen stimulus periods and fifteen detumescence periods. Three participants participated in each of three different experimental conditioning procedures. Sexually explicit visual stimuli preselected by each participant were utilized as the unconditioned stimuli (US), and a neutral slide of a penny jar was employed as the conditioned stimulus (CS). In the first procedure, short delay conditioning, the CS was presented for 15 seconds, followed immediately by the US for 30 seconds. The second procedure was a backward conditioning procedure. In the third procedure, a random control condition, the presentation of CS and US was determined randomly. Results indicated that participants showed systematic maximum increases in penile tumescence from baseline in the short delay conditioning procedure, but not in the other two control procedures. Implications of these results to behavior therapy strategies which are based upon the conditioning of human sexual arousal are examined and discussed.
Behavior modification, 1999 · doi:10.1177/0145445599232004