Table of Contents

Negative Attitudes Toward Masturbation‌‌‌‌‌

DONALD L. MOSHER,1 University of Connecticut

Abramson and Mosher (1975) developed an inventory, Attitudes Toward Masturbation, as a measure of negative attitudes toward masturbation, to measure the con- struct of masturbation-guilt (Mosher, 1979b; Mosher & Vonderheide, 1985). Although the inventory is regarded as a homogeneous measure, a factor analysis conducted for descriptive purposes found three factors: (a) positive attitudes toward masturbation, (b) false beliefs about the harmful nature of masturbation, and (c) personally experienced negative affects associated with masturbation (Abramson & Mosher, 1975). Masturbation-guilt is regarded as a script—a set of rules for ordering a co-assembled family of scenes—learned scenes in which the negative affects of guilt, disgust, shame, and fear have reciprocally interacted with cognitions about masturbation (including general fantasies and sex myths). Masturbation-guilt, as a script, predicts, interprets, regulates, and evaluates conduct in scenes entailing masturbation or in scenes associatively linked through family resemblance of affect, objects, or scene features to past imagined masturbatory scenes.

Description

This inventory is a 30-item (10 of which have reversed scoring), 5-point Likert-type scale anchored by not at all true for me to extremely true for me. Because items were taken from college subjects’ responses to open-ended questions about the consequences of masturbation (Abramson, 1973), the items are useful with educated populations of men and women.

Response Mode and Timing

Respondents can circle the number indicating the relative truth of the statement for them, but the more common scoring has had the subjects indicate response choices on machine-scoreable answer sheets. The scale requires approximately 7 minutes to complete.

Scoring

The 10 items with reversed scoring are 3, 5, 8, 11, 13, 14, 17, 22, 27, and 29. To obtain an index of masturbation-guilt, scores are summed to yield a score from 30 to 150.

Reliability

A corrected split-half reliability of .75 was reported for the original sample of 198 male and female college students

(Abramson & Mosher, 1975). A Cronbach alpha of .94 was found for a sample of 186 college women (Mosher & Vonderheide, 1985).

Validity

The scale has successfully predicted decreased frequency and lower percentage of orgasm to masturbatory behavior (Abramson & Mosher, 1975; Mosher & O’Grady, 1979); less subjective sexual arousal and more negative affective responses to explicit films of male and female masturbation (Mosher & Abramson, 1977); less positive projective stories to films of masturbation (Abramson & Mosher, 1979); less subjective sexual arousal and more negative affects to films of male homosexuality and male masturbation (Mosher & O’Grady, 1979); less pelvic vasocongestion, as measured by thermography, in women reading an erotic story (Abramson, Perry, Rothblatt, Seeley, & Seeley, 1981); more negative affect when recalling a memory of past masturbation (Green & Mosher, 1985); and more negative attitudes toward contraceptives and avoidance of selecting the diaphragm as a method of birth control (Mosher & Vonderheide, 1985). Although masturbation-guilt and sex- guilt (Mosher, 1966, 1968, 1979a) can be viewed as measuring a latent construct of guilt over sexuality, there is also evidence of discriminant validity from sex-guilt (which is a more general sexual script) in a number of the studies cited above.

Address correspondence to Donald L. Mosher, 648 Ternberry Forest Drive, The Villages, FL 32162; e-mail: [email protected]