(PS12-D77) I'm the Problem, It’s Me: Emotional Awareness Reduces the Link Between Externalizing Blame and Sexual Aggression Among Men Experiencing Gender-role Stress

Sexual aggression is endemic in our society, directly affecting half of U.S. women during their lifetimes. Unfortunately, sexual aggression rates have remained stable over 5 decades of research on promising prevention and intervention approaches. Recent literature suggests that promoting prosocial skills may be effective at preventing sexual aggression perpetration. However, more information is needed to inform the most promising psychological and behavioral mechanisms.

Past research establishes a clear link between masculine gender role stress (MGRS)—discomfort resulting from their actions not aligning with masculine norms—and men’s sexual aggression perpetration. The link may exist because MGRS heightens emotions such as shame. Shame is embodied by feeling bad about oneself after committing a social taboo and is consistently linked to aggression. Although past findings are mixed regarding the shame-sexual aggression link, men who attribute their feeling of shame to another person (known as externalizing blame) are the most likely to sexually aggress. Externalizing blame involves an immediate mislabeling of an emotional response and its source, which implies developing emotion regulation skills may help men who externalize blame label or relabel their emotions and the source more accurately. In turn, this could reduce their likelihood of sexual aggression. No research to our knowledge has examined how emotions might impact the link between externalizing blame and sexual aggression. Thus, the current study investigates whether men’s emotional awareness moderates the association between externalizing blame and sexual aggression.

Men (N=299) participated in a study which they believed to be media preference task alongside a woman who dislikes sexual content in media. After completing a brief survey battery—including measures of externalizing blame and emotional awareness—a random half of the men were exposed to a masculinity threat, and the other half were assigned to a control condition. During the media rating task, men had the option to send the woman an explicit video, thus acting sexually aggressive due to being informed that she did not want to view that content. Externalize blame predicted sexual aggression for men exposed to a masculinity threat (b=.55, p=.01). In addition, men with less emotional awareness are significantly more likely to be sexually aggressive than men with high emotional awareness (p< .01). For men in the masculinity threat group, those with more emotional awareness had a weaker effect of externalizing blame on sexual aggression (b=.17, p=.03) compared to those with less emotional awareness (b=.31, p=.02). This study underscores the importance of emotion regulation skills for sexual aggression prevention and intervention programming. Additionally, future research and clinical efforts should investigate how interventions that emphasize enhancing emotional awareness, such as Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, could be used to treat men who have already perpetrated sexual aggression to reduce recidivism. Future research should also focus on how alcohol use may contribute to dysregulation and potentially impede the protective buffering effect of emotion awareness evidenced in this study.