The Relationship Between Power And Sex Based On Attention And Motivation

Power is the fundamental element of social interaction,and psychologists often defined it as the asymmetric control of resources.The relationship between power and sex has been studied for a long history,however,in recent years the research for power and sex mainly focuses on the domain of actual power and infidelity.Researchers found that compared with low-power individuals,the high-powers were more confident,more optimistic,and experienced more positive emotion,their behaviors are less influenced by the social rules and moral constraint.In addition,they were also less affected by threatening events in the society,and powerful people were more likely to engage in the infidelity,sexual harassment,sexual assault,etc.Studies have found that high power was positively correlated with infidelity,and powerful individuals tend to have more infidelity behaviors.While this effect does not exist gender differences,both men and women tend to pay more attention to the opposite sex when given enough power.Previous researchers explored the influence power for sex from the perspective of sociality,these discussions were only confined to specific situations,for example the researches mainly focused on the betrayal,sexual harassment,sexual aggressive behavior and sexual abuse.The purpose of these researches were to reveal the result of power for sex,while ignored the directly association between power or power motivation and sex.According to the approaching theory of power,high power will lead to approaching behavior which related to reward,sex was also belong to reward,so power and sex were more likely to activate the same regions of human brain,there may be a direct connection between the two.The cognitive association between power and sex indicated that,the concept of power is always along with the concept of sex,the activation of the power concept will lead to activate the concept of sex.Therefore,power motivation will activate sexual motivation,then lead to the approach of sex target.In addition,the evolution theory suggested that,during the process of historical evolution,the dominant individuals tend to have more potential sexual partners,and the theory of motivation also indicated that the greater the chance to reach the objectives,more intense the motivation to reach the goal.There were more advantages for powerful individuals to get any resource including sexual partners or romantic relationship,therefore power would motivate goals,then inspire powerful individuals to pursue these goals.Gender difference has been a controversy between power and sex.This controversy mainly existed in two aspects.The theory of evolution suggest that men are more easily motivated by power,because during the human history evolution,power meant greater breeding advantage for males,the power motivation is more intense,and they are more likely to make power as tools to meet the sexual desires,so that they will be more convenient to gain sex with power.While another argument is that when individual was given enough power,the psychological process of power motivated sex was similar between men and women,namely,there is no gender difference between power and sex.Presently most studies confirmed that high power will increase sex interest towards heterosexual,and exist no gender differences.So in the research of this article,especially under the influence of Chinese traditional culture,gender difference is a problem which is worthy of in-depth discussion.We conduct a further research on power and sex from the perspective of intention and motivation with the subject of college students,providing new evidence for this field.We discussed the association between power and sex with the method of experiments and questionnaire.Experiment 1 mainly examined the relationship between power and sex based on attention with the cueing-target task.The indicator was reflecting time of sexual pictures which were dealing with the Photoshop on the condition of high power priming and low power priming.Participants were asked to rate the sexual pictures on a 7-point scale ranging from 1(I am not at all sexually attracted to this person)to 7(I am extremely sexually attracted to this person)to explore the motivational relationship between power and sex.Power will activate sexual motivation,then lead to the approach of sex target.The aim of experiment 3 was to examine the association between power and sex on motivation traits level.The measuring tool mainly included the Desire for Power and Authority Scale,the Personal Sense of Power Scale,Sex Drive Scale,Sexual Sensation Seeking Scale and the SOI-R.Following are the principal results and conclusions:(1)The ANOVA with original reaction time found that individuals with high power priming will pay more attention on the opposite sex targets: High power priming men represent more attention on opposite sex(high attractive opposite-sex targets and moderate attractive opposite-sex targets),while high power priming women only show significantly attention on high attractive opposite-sex targets.(2)High-power individuals,both men and women,recorded significantly greater sexual attraction to the images than low-power individuals,demonstrating that power heightens sexual attraction to the opposite sex among heterosexual men and women.The findings highlight power’s activation of the mating motivation.(3)For men,there were positive correlations between power and sex based on motivation,but not in terms of behavior level.For women,there was no association between power and sex for either motivation or behavior level.The results indicated a motivation-related association between power and sex for men,the gender difference exist in based line of motivation.Overall,power may activate sex motivation,moreover,power motivation was significantly correlated with sex motivation at the motivation traits level.For the gender difference,we suggest that men and women in high power exhibited same mechanism in relationship between power and sex.