title: Schemas, sexuality, and romantic attachment.
abstract: One's self-views are powerful regulators of both cognitive processing and behavioral responding. Sexual self-schemas are cognitive generalizations about sexual aspects of the self. The bivariate sexual self-schema model, which posits independent effects of positive and negative components of women's sexual self-views, was tested. Three hundred eighteen female undergraduates completed anonymous questionnaires, including the Sexual Self-Schema Scale and assessments of sexual responses and romantic attachment patterns. Results extended knowledge of positive-negative schema group contrasts and distinguished the response patterns of the aschematic and co-schematic groups. As predicted, aschematics reported low levels of sexual desire, arousal, and anxiety, and weak romantic attachments, whereas co-schematics endorsed conflicting positive and negative responses to sexual-romantic cues. In addition, path analyses supported the bivariate model. Finally, findings are related to theories of attachment representations within the cognitive hierarchy of the self.
authors.affiliation: Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. jcyranow+@pitt.edu
authors.forename: J M
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Cyranowski
authors.forename: B L
authors.initials: BL
authors.lastname: Andersen
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001007:Anxiety / Q000523:psychology; D001143:Arousal; D003071:Cognition; D003380:Courtship; D005163:Factor Analysis, Statistical; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008149:Love; D008960:Models, Psychological; D009769:Object Attachment; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012649:Self Concept; D019529:Sexuality / Q000523:psychology*; D012752:Shame; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires