A Dress Is (Still) Not a Yes: How Even Simple Key Presses Reveal Sexually Aroused Men's Overreliance on Global Cues...

In a pilot study using mouse-tracking, we examined men's interpretation and weighting of global sexual cues (e.g., clothing style) and specific affective cues (e.g., facial expression) when judging women's flirting intentions. Sexual arousal systematically biased this assessment by increasing the likelihood of overreliance on global cues (OGC). Error rate (ER) emerged as a behavioral indicator of OGC, whereas reaction time (RT) captured complementary information on decision dynamics. Notably, ER also showed a theoretically meaningful pattern of positive correlations with self-report trait measures of interpersonally problematic sexuality (e.g., disinhibited, exploitative). We sought to replicate these findings in a substantially larger sample, using a simplified key-press paradigm and focusing solely on RT and ER as dependent variables. In a preregistered online study with heterosexual men (N = 284), experimentally induced sexual arousal again increased the likelihood of OGC in a sexual flirting task. The critical main and interaction effects were replicated and a similar pattern of positive correlations emerged between the experimental measures and self-report measures of dispositional risk factors for sexually problematic behavior. However, a somewhat different moderation pattern by these individual differences was observed. Taken together, the simplification of the paradigm proved largely successful and the resulting approach appears promising for diagnostic applications in forensic and clinical contexts.