Abstract
College students commonly engage in risky sexual behaviors, such as casual sexual encounters and inconsistent condom use. Discounting paradigms that examine how individuals devalue rewards due to their delay or uncertainty have been used to improve our understanding of behavioral problems, including sexual risk. The current study assessed relations between college women’s sexual partners discounting and risky sexual behavior. In this study, college women (N = 42) completed two sexual partners delay discounting tasks that assessed how choices among hypothetical sexual partners changed across a parametric range of delays in two conditions: condom availability and condom unavailability. Participants also completed two sexual partners probability discounting tasks that assessed partner choices across a parametric range of probabilities in condom availability and unavailability conditions. Additionally, participants reported risky sexual behavior on the Sexual Risk Survey (SRS). Participants discounted delayed partners more steeply in the condom availability condition, but those differences were significant only for those women with three or fewer lifetime sexual partners. There were no consistent differences in discounting rate across condom availability conditions for probability discounting. Sexual partners discounting measures correlated with risky sexual behaviors as measured by the SRS, but a greater number of significant relations were observed with the condoms-unavailable delay discounting task. These findings suggest the importance of examining the interaction of inconsistent condom use and multiple partners in examinations of sexual decision-making.
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Notes
Subjective reward value should decrease as a function of increasing delay; thus, criteria for nonsystematic data, as defined by Johnson and Bickel (2008), included (1) any indifference point greater than the previous by 20% or more of the total reward value or (2) the last indifference point is not less than the first by at 10% or more. All six excluded participants violated the first criterion, and three also violated criterion two.
For delay discounting, this equation takes the form: \( V = \frac{A}{{\left( {1 + kD} \right)^{s} }}, \) where V is subjective value of reward, A is total amount of reward (e.g., most-preferred partner), D is delay to reward, k is a fitted parameter expressing discounting rate, and s is a fitted parameter reflecting scaling of delay. Probabilities from the probability discounting tasks were converted to odds against sex with most-preferred partner, and then curves were fit using a variation of this model: \( V = \frac{A}{{\left( {1 + h\varTheta } \right)^{s} }}. \) Here, Θ is odds against and h is a fitted parameter expressing discounting rate.
A Bonferroni correction applied to the SRS scales resulted in a new significance values of p < .008. Only the significance of the risky sex acts subscale changed as a result of this correction. Table 1 reports p values for SRS subscales, with those significant after correction indicated with an asterisk. Significance values for individual items are included to identify specific, targetable risk behaviors.
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Lemley, S.M., Jarmolowicz, D.P., Parkhurst, D. et al. The Effects of Condom Availability on College Women’s Sexual Discounting. Arch Sex Behav 47, 551–563 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-017-1040-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-017-1040-3