Social motives and cognitive power-sex associations: predictors of aggressive sexual behavior

The present study investigated whether implicit social motives and cognitive power-sex associations would predict self-reports of aggressive sexual behavior. Participants wrote stories in response to Thematic Apperception Test pictures, which were scored for power and affiliation-intimacy motives. They also completed a lexical-decision priming task that provided an index of the strength of the cognitive association between the concepts of "power" and "sexuality." For men, high levels of power motivation and strong power-sex associations predicted more frequent aggression. There was also an interaction: Power motivation was unrelated to aggression for men with the weakest power-sex associations. For women, high levels of affiliation-intimacy motivation were associated with more frequent aggression. Strong power-sex associations were also predictive for women but only when affiliation-intimacy motivation was high.