Les apports de la pléthysmographie et de la psychologie cognitive dans la compréhension des relations entre l'anxiété et l'excitation sexuelle

For years, sexual arousal has been considered as incompatible with anxiety. Studies using plethysmographic techniques developed in the last decades have demonstrated that it is not always so. Depending on experimental conditions, anxiety can exert an inhibitory, neutral or facilitative effect. It is tempting to establish a link between these observation data and concepts otherwise issued from cognitive psychology. A coherent theory can thus be inferred about the relationship between anxiety and sexual arousal. This theory can be summed up in a few major points: the inhibitory effect of anxiety on sexual function would mainly be due to a cognitive interference phenomenon; the subject focuses on danger cues rather than on erotic stimuli. In this case, the subject's working memory is saturated by danger-related information, therefore cognitive function available for treating erotic stimuli is diminished and sexual response is impaired. A cognitive emotional structure called erotophobia could be regarded as a vulnerability factor to cognitive interference. If the cognitive interference mechanism is not activated, anxiety tends to facilitate sexual arousal, by increasing the attention on erotic cues and/or by attributing the physiological correlates of anxiety to an erotic source.