Analysis of the consistency of objective measures of sexual arousal in women.
Labial temperature gives the steadiest read on female sexual arousal across repeated checks.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team tracked three body signals of sexual arousal in the same women across several lab visits.
They recorded vaginal blood flow, vaginal pulse, and labial temperature.
Each woman returned for repeated sessions so the researchers could see which signal stayed steady.
What they found
Labial temperature rose the same way every time.
The other two signals moved around more from visit to visit.
Temperature won as the most trustworthy cue for arousal in women.
How this fits with other research
Killeen (1978) already showed how to decide when a measure is stable. E et al. used the same idea: watch the same person long enough to see if numbers settle.
Mueser et al. (1991) used heart-rate habituation to judge PTSD gains. Both papers prove that one stable signal beats many jumpy ones.
Butler et al. (2021) found edible treats stay preferred month after month, while social and leisure items drift. The pattern matches here: temperature acts like the edible—steady—while blood flow and pulse act like the leisure items—shifty.
Why it matters
If you ever need to track private arousal for therapy or research, pick labial temperature. One good probe beats three noisy ones. Fewer sessions, cleaner data, faster decisions.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Switch your sensor to labial temperature and run two baseline sessions before any intervention.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Eight adult women volunteers viewed the same erotic film in two different sessions. Their resulting genital responses were recorded simultaneously by three different measures: vaginal pressure pulse, vaginal blood volume, and labial temperature change. During the erotic stimulation, the vaginal pressure pulse and labial responses always increased, and the vaginal blood volume response increased on all but two occasions. Although there was considerable intersubject variability in each genital measure, all three measures were found to have some intrasubject consistency over sessions with respect to either their response amplitudes or patterns, with labial temperature being the most consistent on both parameters. The relationship between the response patterns of the three measures during the film was also relatively consistent across sessions, as was the correspondence between subjective ratings of arousal and both vaginal pressure pulse and labial responses but not vaginal blood volume response. To overcome the problem of considerable intrasubject variability of response amplitudes, it was suggested that the inclusion in the data analysis of several parameters of response patterns, which were relatively stable over sessions, might facilitate the evaluation of a treatment.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 1979 · doi:10.1901/jaba.1979.12-701