| Sexual violence against women is highly prevalent on college campuses. Survivors of sexual violence often engage in coping strategies to alleviate distress associated with the event. One such coping strategy is risky sexual behavior, which can exacerbate rather than reduce posttraumatic distress. There is currently a dearth in the literature as to the underlying mechanisms that drive the relationship between sexual trauma exposure and risky sexual behavior. The present study used a laboratory-behavioral sexual discounting task to measure sexual risk-taking behavior following experiences of positive or negative affect and an emotion suppression experimental manipulation. Sexually active adult female undergraduates (N = 175) completed a self-report measure of sexually traumatic experiences, a self-report measure of affective experiences, an autobiographical recall task, and a delay discounting task for hypothetical sexual outcomes. Half of the participants (N = 87) were also asked to suppress their emotional response to the autobiographical recall task. Findings indicated that sexual traumatization had a significant main effect on risky sexual behavior, but affective condition and emotion suppression exhibited no significant relationships with delay discounting for risky sex. These findings suggest other psychosocial factors may underlie the relationship between sexual trauma exposure and risky sexual behavior, but further research is warranted.
Key Words: sexual assault, sexual trauma, sexual discounting, risky sexual behavior, positive affect, negative affect, emotion suppression |