Responses to death and sex stimulus materials as a function of repression-sensitization

It was hypothesized that sensitizers would express more anxiety to literary material dealing with both sex and death than would repressers. Further, it was hypothesized that there would be more anxiety verbalized to both sets of experimental materials than there would be for control materials. From a larger subject pool, 36 male repressers and 30 female repressers plus equal numbers of male and female sensitizers were chosen on the basis of their scores on the Repression-Sensitization (R-S) Scale. One third of the Ss were given a series of highly erotic literary materials to read, one third were given a similar set of materials dealing with death, and one third were given the neutral control set of materials. Self ratings on six different five-point rating scales were obtained immediately afterwards. While sexual arousal was significantly higher for all groups having the sexual materials to read, there were no consistent differences in ratings of anxiety either as a function of R-S or of the materials. Thus neither of the two hypotheses under study was supported. There was some evidence of sex differences in the study, suggesting that women respond more strongly to the death material and also that they may sexualize these materials.