Mindfulness-Based Sex Therapy Improves Genital-Subjective Arousal Concordance in Women With Sexual Desire/Arousal Difficulties

Thereisemergingevidence fortheefficacy ofmindfulness-basedinterventions for improving women’s sexual functioning.To date, this literature has been limited to self-reports of sexual response and distress.Sexual arousal concordance—the degree of agreement between self-reported sexual arousal and psychophysiological sexual response—has been of interest due to the speculation that it may be a key componentto healthy sexual functioning in women.We examinedthe effects of mindfulness-based sext herapy on sexual arousal concordance in a sample of women with sexual desire/arousal difficulties (n=79,M age 40.8 years) who participated in an in-laboratory assessment of sexual arousal usinga vaginal photoplethysmograph beforeand after four sessionsof groupmindfulness-based sextherapy.Genital subjective sexual arousal concordance significantly increased from pre-treatment levels, with changes in subjective sexual arousal predicting contemporaneous genital sexual arousal (but not the reverse). These findings have implications for our understanding of the mechanisms by which mindfulness-based sextherapy improves sexual functioning in women,and suggest that such treatment may lead to an integration of physical and subjective arousal processes.Moreover, our findings suggestthat future research might consider the adoption of sexual arousal concordance as a
relevant endpoint in treatment outcome research of women with sexual desire/arousal concerns.