Sexology is a wonderfully exciting discipline. It is at the crossroads of biology, psychology and sociology. It links our bodies, our minds and our relationships with others. We are at a crucial moment in the development of sexology in Switzerland. Increasing public interest, matched by a rise in consultations for sexual disorders, has led to a need to formalize the discipline. There is pressure to include new medical research and evidence-based treatments. In this introductory talk, I would like to raise interest and awareness about sexology. I will do this in the following way: (1) give an overview of the development of sexology, a historical and philosophical perspective, (2) outline and illustrate the main sexual dysfunctions, and (3) develop guidelines for evaluation of sexual disorders and guidelines
for professional training in this branch.
John Köhl has a diploma in clinical psychology and has been working at the psychosomatic gynecology and sexology consultation of the University Hospital in Geneva since 2006. His interests include
counter transfer-transfer dynamics, sexual desire disorders and psychosomatic disorders in general.
This talk reports recent research showing that effort-related cardiovascular response during the performance of cognitive tasks is systematically influenced by (1) the presentation of masked general activation and deactivation cues and masked affective stimuli like emotional expressions. These effects have been found to depend on the task context. Participants who were exposed to masked low resolution sad faces in the context of cognitive tasks showed stronger sympathetically nervous system discharge to the heart than participants who were exposed masked low resolution smiling faces when the task was easy. However, when the task was difficult, happiness primes resulted in higher effort than sadness effort. Implications for theories about effort mobilization and “unconscious affect” are discussed.
Guido Gendolla is professor of psychology at the University of Geneva. His research interest is on the psychology of motivation, especially affective influences on effort mobilization and related physiological responses.