Fallis Erin E, Rehman Uzma S, Purdon Christine
Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, Waterloo, ON, N2L 3G1, Canada,
Arch Sex Behav. 2014 Apr;43(3):541-50. doi: 10.1007/s10508-013-0177-y. Epub 2013 Aug 29.
Sexual script theory implies that partners' ability to gauge one another's level of sexual satisfaction is a key factor in determining their own sexual satisfaction. However, relatively little research has examined how well partners gauge one another's sexual satisfaction and the factors that predict their accuracy. We hypothesized that the degree of bias in partner judgments of sexual satisfaction would be associated with quality of sexual communication. We further posited that emotion recognition would ameliorate the biases in judgment such that poor communicators with good emotion recognition would make less biased judgments of partner satisfaction. Participants were 84 married or cohabiting heterosexual couples who completed measures of their own and their partners' sexual satisfaction, relationship satisfaction, quality of communication about sexual issues within their relationships, and emotion recognition ability. Results indicated that both men and women tended to be accurate in perceiving their partners' levels of sexual satisfaction (i.e., partner perceptions were strongly correlated with self-reports). One sample t-tests indicated that men's perceptions of their partners' sexual satisfaction were biased such that they slightly underestimated their partners' levels of sexual satisfaction whereas women neither over- nor underestimated their partners' sexual satisfaction. However, the gender difference was not significant. Bias was attenuated by quality of sexual communication, which interacted with emotion recognition ability such that when sexual communication was good, there was no significant association between emotion recognition ability and bias, but when sexual communication was poor, better emotion recognition ability was associated with less bias.
性脚本理论表明，伴侣评估彼此性满意度水平的能力是决定他们自身性满意度的关键因素。然而，相对较少的研究考察了伴侣评估彼此性满意度的程度以及预测其准确性的因素。我们假设，伴侣对性满意度判断的偏差程度与性沟通质量相关。我们进一步假定，情绪识别能够改善判断中的偏差，使得情绪识别能力良好的沟通不佳者对伴侣满意度的判断偏差更小。研究参与者为84对已婚或同居的异性恋夫妇，他们完成了关于自己及伴侣的性满意度、关系满意度、关系中性问题沟通质量以及情绪识别能力的测量。结果表明，男性和女性在感知伴侣的性满意度水平方面往往都是准确的（即伴侣的感知与自我报告高度相关）。单样本t检验表明，男性对伴侣性满意度的感知存在偏差，他们略微低估了伴侣的性满意度水平，而女性既没有高估也没有低估伴侣的性满意度。然而，这种性别差异并不显著。性沟通质量减弱了偏差，性沟通质量与情绪识别能力相互作用，以至于当性沟通良好时，情绪识别能力与偏差之间没有显著关联，但当性沟通不佳时，更好的情绪识别能力与更小的偏差相关。
