Eva Harden
Pronouns: She, Her
Research Mentor(s): Terri Conley
Research Mentor School/College/Department: Psychology / LSA
Program: UROPF
Session: Session 7 (4:40pm – 5:30pm)
Authors:
Abstract
Sex guilt is typically measured by the Revised Mosher Sex Guilt inventory, which has over 7,000 citations on Google Scholar. Though it intends to measure sex guilt, we hypothesize that it may be measuring a closely related construct: sexual conservatism (which emphasizes the importance of conventional sexual values).To test this we recruited students from the University of Michigan’s intro-to-psychology subject pool to participate in our experiment. In this experiment, all students were primed in person using a card-sorting task. Within this task, some students were primed with neutral scenarios, while others were primed with sex-guilt scenarios. After this, we administered a Sexual Liberalism Scale (Rye et al., 2015), the Revised Mosher Sex Guilt Inventory (RMSG) (Janda, 2011), and a Contemporary Sex Guilt Inventory (CSG) (Kugler & Jones, 1992; Ziegler, 2014) to participants. We found that guilt-primed sexually liberal individuals and neutral-primed sexually liberal individuals did not have a significant difference in scores on the Revised Mosher Sex Guilt Inventory. Though, the different primes did lead to a significant difference in scores on the Contemporary Sex Guilt Inventory. We then concluded that the Revised Mosher Sex Guilt Inventory does not accurately measure sex guilt, but instead sexual conservatism.
