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Sex Within Many Fields Of Study

Sex Within Many Fields of Study

Human Sexuality is the common term referring to a range of sexually related aspects of human life, including physical and psychological development, and behaviors, attitudes, and social customs associated with the individual's sense of gender, relationships, sexual activity, mate selection, and reproduction. Sexuality permeates many areas of human life and culture, thereby setting humans apart from other members of the animal kingdom, in which the objective of sexuality is more often confined to reproduction. This article discusses the sexual anatomy, development, physiology, and behavior of human beings. To explain individual differences in human sexual expression, investigators most often stress either physiological or experiential determinants.
Psychologists commonly support some variant of learning theory (classical conditioning, operant conditioning, or social learning theory) as an explanatory framework and a source of hypotheses and methodology. The historical use of social learning theory is described in this article, and we review its central aspects and provide examples of sexuality research in which it plays a major role.
Specifically, we describe both early and current research in four broad topic areas: sexuality development, adolescent sexuality and contraceptive use, health-related sexual behavior, and coercive sexuality. Social learning theory is then evaluated and compared with competing theories regarding its ability to explain empirical data, its predictive utility, and its parsimony.
Sexuality theorists and researchers have made complete and constant use of social learning theory: Research in this review spans almost the full 40-year history of modern social learning. Even though this research spans the extent of human sexuality, a substantial portion falls into one of four broad categories.
These categories are the development of sexuality,...