Exploring the Links Between Sexuality & Personality at Consonance (Gleichklang)
What relationships exist between individual characteristics in the areas of sexuality and personality?
Are the five personality dimensions – neuroticism, extraversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness to experience – suitable for capturing differences in sexual experiences and behaviors?
Schmid and Buss (2000) investigated these and other questions in an extensive study with 207 female and 107 male participants. Methodologically impressive, they first developed a list of more than 300 adjectives describing sexuality-related attitudes, experiences, and behaviors. This list was subsequently reduced to 67 adjectives through content and statistical analyses and presented to the participants for self-assessment. In addition, the participants were also asked to rate themselves on an adjective list suitable for assessing the Five-Factor Model.
The following results emerged:
Individual differences in the area of sexuality can be reliably captured using 7 basic dimensions: Sexual Attractiveness, Partnership Exclusivity, Sex-Role Orientation, Sexual Restraint, Sexualization, Emotional Investment, and Sexual Orientation. Accordingly, people differ systematically in the extent to which they perceive themselves as sexually attractive, place value on restricting sexuality to committed relationships, exhibit traits of typical masculinity or femininity, practice sexual abstinence and restraint, indulge in boundless sexual pleasure, develop feelings of love and romance, and have a heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual orientation.
There are diverse correlations between the seven dimensions of sexuality and the five dimensions of personality:
- (1) Higher social agreeableness is associated with a stronger tendency toward emotional investment and partnership exclusivity.
- (2) Extraversion correlates with sexual attractiveness and sexualization, and conversely with sexual restraint.
- (3) Bisexual and homosexual orientation are associated with increased openness to experience.
- (4) Conscientiousness is associated with a higher sex-role orientation and increased partnership exclusivity. However, sexualization is lower among those with high conscientiousness.
- (5) Women exhibited a higher sex-role orientation, stronger partnership exclusivity, and greater emotional investment.
- (6) In contrast, men were characterized by higher sexualization.
Conclusion:
As in the area of personality, there are also diverse individual and gender-related differences in the area of sexuality, despite substantial overlap. Individual sexual attitudes, experiences, and behaviors are closely linked to personality.
Schmitt, D. P., & Buss, D. M. (2000). Sexual Dimensions of Person Description: Beyond or Subsumed by the Big Five? Journal of Research in Personality, 34, 141-177
