People make decisions about nearly everything throughout the day. What to eat for breakfast, what to wear, which train to take to work, what to make for dinner, which show to watch, and so on. Sometimes, though, other things are competing for attention. Cognitive and emotional processes are involved in decision-making, which can be influenced by prior experiences and the situation at hand.

Some research has shown that sexual or erotic stimuli can be more distracting or attention-grabbing during the decision-making process. It’s not that this stimulus fully steals attention away, but they can compete with other information being processed at the same time.

Understanding Sexual Attitudes

The erotophobia-erotophilia (E-E) continuum is a way to explain how one generally responds to sexual activity or erotic content.

• Erotophobia = tendency toward more negative or avoidant responses.
• Erotophilia = tendency toward more positive or accepting responses.

Previous research suggests these attitudes could be associated with how people process sexual information. A more recent study looked at whether they could also be related to decision-making when sexual material is present.

Sixty-three straight men between 18 and 30 years old completed a series of tasks through a web link. Participants completed several questionnaires, including the Sexual Opinion Survey (SOS), which measured their general responses to sexual behavior and placed them along the E-E continuum.

There were also two series of decision-making tasks, each followed by a self-assessment manikin scale (SAM).

• The decision-making tasks: 40 combinations of three images each. One set contained neutral images; the other set contained sexually explicit images. Participants had to choose which image out of the three should be removed from the set to get as many “points” as possible.
• SAM: 5 drawings of manikins representing how pleasant and arousing they found the images.

Does Sexual Attitude Affect Our Choices?

Participants appeared to perform better when the content was neutral. The median score for neutral content was about 6.9, and the median score for sexual content was about 6.3. Because higher scores represented better performance, participants generally made more effective choices for the neutral images.

The sexual content was rated as more pleasant and arousing, according to SAM results. However, participants’ SOS scores were not related to their decision-making scores. This suggests that being more erotophobic or erotophilic did not predict how well someone performed when sexual content was present.

This difference in performance could be related to the attention-grabbing nature of erotic content. Sexual content may be distracting during decision-making, regardless of one’s general attitude toward sexual content.

Findings are limited to a small sample of young straight men. The study does not establish that sexual content interferes with everyday activities or decision-making outside the laboratory.

Key Takeaways

• Participants performed better on the decision-making task with neutral content than with sexual content.
  • This trend did not appear to depend on how one felt toward sexual or erotic content.
• Lower scores on this particular experimental task do not necessarily mean poorer decision-making in everyday life.
  • Further research is needed to establish whether the difference has meaningful real-world or clinical consequences.
• This study did not examine why decision-making performance differed when sexual content was present.
  • Future studies could include information on the underlying thought processes along the E-E continuum.
• It remains unclear whether the observed difference is specific to sexual content or might also occur with other salient or attention-grabbing stimuli. For example, whether a hungry person might similarly be distracted by images of appealing food.
  • Even if sexual stimuli affect attention or task performance, this does not in itself tell us how that knowledge should be applied or who, if anyone, should change their behavior.
• If thoughts or feelings about sex cause ongoing distress or interfere with daily life or relationships, it may be helpful to speak with a sexual health therapist.

Resources

• Amezcua-Gutiérrez, C., Frías-Dimas, A., Iribe-Burgos, A., Hernández-González, M., & García-Hernández, J. P. (2026). The relationship between erotophobia–erotophilia and decision-making in response to sexual stimuli. The Journal of Sexual Medicine, 23(9). Oxford Academic. https://doi.org/10.1093/jsxmed/qdag248
• Macapagal, K. R., & Janssen, E. (2011). The valence of sex:Automatic affective associations in erotophilia and erotophobia. Personality and Individual Differences, 51(6), 699–703. PubMed Central. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2011.06.008
• Strahler, J., Baranowski, A. M., Walter, B., Huebner, N., & Stark, R. (2019). Attentional bias toward and distractibility by sexual cues: A meta-analytic integration. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 105, 276. PubMed. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2019.07.015