Sexual abuse and sexual function: an examination of sexually relevant cognitive processes

Participants were 61 sexually abused and 57 nonsexually abused women. The authors examined whether recent methodologies adopted from social-cognitive psychology might prove helpful in understanding the previously reported negative relation between childhood sexual abuse (CSA) and adult sexual function. In Part I, a card-sort task was used to explore potential differences between sexually abused and nonsexually abused women in the categorization of positive/negative self-information. In Part 2, sexually relevant information networks, believed to represent the way in which information is organized, accessed, and retrieved from memory, were compared. Sexually abused women differed from nonsexually abused women in the meanings they attributed to many sexuality-relevant concepts but not in how they compartmentalized positive/negative self-information. The findings provide insight into the cognitive processes by which CSA experiences might influence adult sexual function and provide a starting point for future research using this type of methodology.