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The Psychobiology of Sexual
Arousal and Behavior

David L. Rowland

Sexual arousal, as well as its end point, sexual behavior, involves a web of
physiological, psychological, and, cultural factors. Yet like most other biologi-
cally relevant behaviors, the personal experience of sexual arousal and response
seldom reveals the complex mechanisms that underlie it. When a problem in-
terferes with this mechanism, we are strongly motivated to analyze it, and only
then are the intricacies uncovered.


CONCEPTUALIZATION OF SEXUAL AROUSAL
AND RESPONSE

Various models of sexual arousal and response have been proposed over the
past century. Contemporary models are more detailed than earlier ones and em-
phasize different aspects of sexual response depending on the disciplinary frame-
work from which they emanated. Some, for example, take a clinical or medical
orientation toward sexual arousal and response, others a psychophysiological or
approach.


Models for Sexual Response

The seed for the modern conceptualization of sexual response was planted by
Masters and Johnson ( 1966), whose "sexual response cycle" attempted to pro-
vide descriptive labels for the sequence of physiological (mainly genital) events

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Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.com

Publication Information: Book Title: The Psychology of Sexual Orientation, Behavior, and Identity: A Handbook. Contributors: Louis Diamant - editor, Richard D. McAnulty - editor. Publisher: Greenwood Press. Place of Publication: Westport, CT. Publication Year: 1995. Page Number: 19.
    
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