Sex Guilt and the Sexual Behavior Sequence

It has been repeatedly demonstrated that guilt over sex is inversely related to sexual responses to projective tests. Leiman and Epstein (1961) showed that sexual responses to a thematic appreception test were a negative function of sexual deprivation for guilty subjects, whereas the reverse was true of those who were less guilt ridden. In another study (Galbraith, Hahn and Leiberman, 1968), sexual responses to the word-association test were negatively correlated with sex-guilt. Moreover, Galbraith and Mosher (1968) and Galbraith (1968) found that sexual stimulation did not significantly augment responses to the word-association test among high-guilt subjects, although low-guilt subjects did display a significant increase. By contrast, there has been a paucity of research relating sex-guilt to reports of sexual behavior as such. However, Leiman and Epstein (1961) showed that individuals with ulore sex-guilt reported a lower frequency of orgasm per week. In all of the previously mentioned studies the subjects were male undergraduates, a very limited basis for gen