Sexual Boredom Index (SBI)

1. Abstract

The Sexual Boredom Index (SBI) is a psychometrically validated, self-report instrument engineered to quantify sexual boredom conceptualized specifically as a transient, context-dependent state rather than an immutable personality trait. Developed by Leonor de Oliveira, Ryan Rahm-Knigge, Jessie Ford, Eli Coleman, and Kristen Mark (2025), the SBI addresses a critical measurement gap in contemporary sexology and relational psychology, where sexual dissatisfaction and desire discrepancies have historically overshadowed the phenomenological experience of monotony, affective disengagement, and habituation during sexual activities. Grounded in empirical qualitative narratives from community samples and refined through iterative expert panels, the instrument comprises 6 concise items evaluated on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (Strongly disagree) to 5 (Strongly agree), referencing the respondent’s sexual encounters over the preceding month.

Psychometric evaluation through exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) confirms a unidimensional factor structure reflecting state-level sexual boredom characterized by perceived monotony, mechanical execution, emotional detachment, and habit-driven sexual activity. The SBI demonstrates robust internal consistency reliability (Cronbach’s α = .88). Discriminant and convergent validity analyses reveal significant theoretical coherence: SBI scores demonstrate statistically significant inverse correlations with sexual pleasure and subjective sexual well-being, alongside positive correlations with measures of impulsivity and attentional difficulties, corroborating theoretical models linking boredom proneness to attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) traits. By establishing an empirically validated, brief state measure, the SBI serves as a vital clinical assessment instrument and empirical research metric for investigating sexual dysfunction, relational satisfaction, sexual script rigidity, and therapeutic interventions for long-term couples.

2. Keywords

Sexual Boredom, Sexual Boredom Index, State Boredom, Sexual Satisfaction, Psychometrics, Sexual Script Theory, Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, Monotony, Relational Health, Factor Analysis

3. Authors

The Sexual Boredom Index was developed and psychometrically validated by an interdisciplinary team of researchers specializing in sexual health, family social science, and behavioral medicine:

• Leonor de Oliveira, Ph.D. — Institute for Sexual and Gender Health, Department of Family Medicine and Community Health, Medical School, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. (ORCID: 0000-0002-9903-8046; Correspondence: [email protected]).
• Ryan Rahm-Knigge, Ph.D. — Institute for Sexual and Gender Health, Department of Family Medicine and Community Health, Medical School, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States.
• Jessie Ford, Ph.D. — Department of Sociomedical Sciences, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, New York, New York, United States.
• Eli Coleman, Ph.D. — Institute for Sexual and Gender Health, Department of Family Medicine and Community Health, Medical School, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States.
• Kristen Mark, Ph.D., MPH — Institute for Sexual and Gender Health, Department of Family Medicine and Community Health, Medical School, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States.

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Sexual Boredom Index (SBI) is to provide an empirically grounded, brief, and psychometrically sound assessment of state sexual boredom within adult populations across diverse gender identities and sexual orientations. Historically, research within clinical sexology and relationship science has conflated sexual boredom with broader, generalized constructs such as hypoactive sexual desire, sexual dissatisfaction, or global marital distress. However, sexual boredom represents a distinct experiential phenomenon characterized by feelings of understimulation, repetitive script enactment, cognitive disengagement, and emotional detachment during intimate encounters, even in the presence of intact physiological functioning and partner affection.

Prior measurement attempts, such as the Sexual Boredom Scale (SBS; Watt & Ewing, 1996), primarily conceptualized sexual boredom as a stable personality trait or dispositional boredom proneness applied to the sexual domain. While dispositional measures capture an individual’s enduring susceptibility to becoming sexually bored across partners and life stages, they remain largely insensitive to situational fluctuations, partner dynamics, relationship duration, and acute therapeutic change. The SBI fills this critical empirical and diagnostic void by capturing sexual boredom as an experiential, context-dependent state reported over a defined temporal window (specifically, the past month).

In clinical practice, the SBI provides sex therapists, couple counselors, and clinical psychologists with a targeted diagnostic screener to differentiate whether a client’s reported loss of libido stems from primary desire deficits, physiological dysfunctions (such as erectile disorder or arousal difficulties), or secondary sexual habituation. Identifying sexual boredom as a state enables clinicians to design specific behavioral interventions, including sexual script diversification, mindfulness-based cognitive strategies to address attentional drift, and the renegotiation of erotic novelties. In empirical research, the SBI enables investigators to model longitudinal trajectories of sexual boredom within romantic partnerships, examine its intersections with neurodivergent cognitive profiles (e.g., ADHD), and assess the efficacy of psychoeducational or therapeutic interventions designed to enhance sexual well-being.

5. Psychological Construct

The psychological construct assessed by the SBI is state sexual boredom, defined as an aversive, transient cognitive-affective state marked by an inability to achieve meaningful engagement, excitement, or satisfaction during sexual experiences, accompanied by a subjective sense of monotony, mechanical repetition, and emotional detachment. Unlike general boredom proneness or sexual anhedonia, state sexual boredom is situated within specific behavioral encounters and interpersonal contexts.

Although the final psychometric structure of the SBI is unidimensional, the underlying construct encompasses several interconnected phenomenological facets identified through comprehensive qualitative investigations of community narratives:

• Perceived Monotony and Predictability: The cognitive appraisal of sexual interactions as unvarying, repetitive, and devoid of novelty. Individuals experiencing monotony perceive the sexual repertoire as an invariant routine where sequences of touch, timing, and outcomes are rigidly predetermined, diminishing anticipation and dopamine-driven incentive salience.
• Affective Disengagement and In-Session Boredom: The direct emotional experience of feeling bored, uninspired, or restless while engaged in sexual activity. This reflects an acute mismatch between the individual’s optimal arousal threshold and the actual stimulation provided by the sexual encounter.
• Desire for Novelty and Enrichment: A subjective longing or conscious wish for sexual encounters to be more stimulating, creative, or emotionally compelling. Rather than indicating an absence of sexual drive, this component reflects an active, unfulfilled appetite for variation and cognitive stimulation.
• Mechanical Execution (Going Through the Motions): The behavioral and psychological manifestation of treating sex as an automated, perfunctory task. In this state, physical behaviors occur absent psychological absorption, transforming intimacy into an obligation or somatic routine devoid of creative spontaneity.
• Attentional and Relational Disconnection: The subjective feeling of psychological detachment, cognitive wandering, or dissociation from one’s partner or own bodily sensations during sexual interactions. This attentional drift aligns with broader cognitive models of boredom, wherein individuals struggle to sustain focused attention on the ongoing activity.
• Habitual Compliance: Engaging in sexual activity primarily driven by external scripts, relationship maintenance obligations, or habitual momentum rather than intrinsic somatic or erotic desire.

6. Theoretical Framework

The development and validation of the SBI are rooted in three major complementary paradigms: Cognitive-Attentional Theories of Boredom, Sexual Script Theory, and the Dual Control Model of Sexual Response.

Cognitive-Attentional Theories of Boredom

Contemporary cognitive psychology (e.g., Eastwood et al., 2012; Danckert & Merrifield, 2018) conceptualizes boredom not merely as an absence of stimulation, but as an attentional failure: an aversive state of wanting, but being unable, to engage in satisfying activity, coupled with the inability to sustain attention on internal or external information required for participation. In the sexual domain, this framework posits that sexual boredom arises when individuals experience difficulties sustaining attention on erotic stimuli, leading to cognitive drift, frustration, and perceived meaninglessness. This theoretical foundation directly explains the empirical link established between SBI scores and neurocognitive markers of attention regulation, such as inattention and impulsivity characteristic of ADHD.

Sexual Script Theory

Originating from the sociological framework of Gagnon and Simon (1973), Sexual Script Theory posits that human sexual behavior is governed by cultural scenarios, interpersonal interactions, and intrapsychic scripting. Cultural scripts delineate normative sexual behaviors, while interpersonal scripts coordinate behaviors between partners. Over time within committed relationships, interpersonal sexual scripts often undergo routinization and ossification. When sexual scripts become hyper-predictable, rigid, and restricted to standardized repertoires, the intrapsychic arousal mechanism diminishes. The SBI captures the subjective manifestation of hyper-routinized scripts, reflected in feelings of mechanical performance and monotony.

The Dual Control Model of Sexual Response

Formulated by Bancroft and Janssen (2000), the Dual Control Model postulates that sexual response depends on a balance between sexual excitation (SEI) and sexual inhibition (SIS). State sexual boredom can be understood as a breakdown in excitatory processing: insufficient erotic novelty fails to activate the sexual excitation system, while habituation increases subtle inhibitory processes (such as cognitive distraction and performance fatigue). Consequently, the individual experiences an elevated threshold for arousal, experiencing intimate acts as burdensome obligations rather than intrinsically rewarding behaviors.

7. Validity

The psychometric validation of the SBI was conducted through rigorous qualitative and quantitative phases, establishing robust evidence for content, structural, convergent, and discriminant validity in accordance with the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing.

Content and Construct Validity

Initial item generation originated directly from qualitative narrative data gathered by de Oliveira and colleagues (2021), which investigated how individuals define and experience sexual boredom in a community sample. This inductive approach ensured high ecological validity, capturing the authentic semantic vernacular and lived phenomenological expressions of participants. The initial item pool of 10 statements was subjected to an expert consensus panel comprising three clinical sexologists and psychometricians who refined the items through iterative review cycles, eliminating semantic ambiguities and ensuring comprehensive coverage of the construct domain.

Convergent and Criterion Validity

In the primary validation study (de Oliveira et al., 2025) involving an online sample of U.S. adults aged 18 to 94 across diverse gender identities, the SBI demonstrated strong, statistically significant convergent correlations with related constructs. The SBI exhibited significant negative correlations with validated indices of sexual pleasure and overall subjective sexual well-being, confirming the hypothesis that higher state sexual boredom directly corresponds to diminished affective and sensory satisfaction during sexual activity.

Discriminant and Neurocognitive Validity

Discriminant validity was established by assessing the relationship between the SBI and cognitive-behavioral measures of attentional regulation and impulsivity. Consistent with cognitive-attentional models of boredom, SBI scores correlated positively with self-reported attention difficulties and elevated impulsivity, reflecting traits common in individuals with ADHD. This finding provides critical empirical evidence that state sexual boredom possesses distinct cognitive underpinnings separable from general relational animosity or physical sexual dysfunction, capturing specific attentional drift and novelty-seeking deficits during sexual interaction.

8. Reliability

The reliability of the Sexual Boredom Index was evaluated using Classical Test Theory metrics within a diverse demographic sample of American adults. The final 6-item scale demonstrated high internal consistency reliability:

• Cronbach’s Alpha (α): The scale achieved an overall Cronbach’s α of .88, indicating robust homogeneity among the items without problematic item redundancy (which typically occurs at α > .95).
• Item-Total Remainder Correlations: During scale refinement, items retaining inclusion demonstrated strong corrected item-total correlations, exceeding conventional psychometric thresholds (r > .50), verifying that each individual item contributes meaningfully to the shared variance of the latent state boredom factor.
• Error Variance: The high internal consistency indicates that approximately 77% of the variance in total SBI scores reflects true score variance, leaving only 23% attributable to measurement error.

Given the brief 6-item structure, this level of internal consistency underscores an optimal balance between empirical precision and administrative efficiency, minimizing respondent fatigue in intensive longitudinal and daily diary study designs.

9. Factor Analysis

The structural dimensionality of the Sexual Boredom Index was examined through an integrated sequence of Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA).

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

The original 10 candidate items generated from the qualitative phase were initially evaluated using EFA. The initial extraction suggested a 2-factor model. However, inspection of the factor matrix revealed severe structural imbalances: the vast majority of items loaded strongly onto Factor 1, whereas only two items (Items 3 and 6 of the preliminary pool) loaded onto Factor 2. Psychometric scrutiny demonstrated that these two items exhibited poor inter-item correlations with the rest of the pool, low corrected item-total remainder coefficients, and questionable conceptual utility as an independent subscale. Consequently, these two items were excised, and an EFA was re-run on the remaining items. The secondary EFA yielded a clean, parsimonious single-factor solution, with all remaining items exhibiting strong factor loadings well above the conservative .40 criterion.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

The remaining items were subsequently subjected to Confirmatory Factor Analysis to evaluate the adequacy of the unidimensional measurement model. The initial CFA model indicated areas of local strain. Inspection of modification indices revealed substantial error covariance between preliminary items 9 and 10, as well as between preliminary items 4 and 5, pointing to semantic overlap and localized redundancy. To optimize model parsimony and avoid artificial parameter inflation, the redundant items (items 5 and 10 of the preliminary version) were removed from the instrument.

The final CFA was performed on the retained 6-item unidimensional model. Global fit assessment revealed adequate structural fit across key indices:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): Demonstrated adequate fit, satisfying benchmark standards (≥ .90 to .95).
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): Demonstrated adequate fit (≥ .90 to .95).
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): Exhibited acceptable fit (≤ .08).
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): Evaluated slightly below conventional adequate thresholds (falling just outside the strict ≤ .06 to .08 window), a known statistical artifact frequently observed in low-degree-of-freedom models with short scale lengths (Kenny et al., 2015).

The resulting 6-item single-factor structure represents a theoretically cohesive, empirically verified measure capturing the multidimensional manifestations of state sexual boredom under a single operationalized latent construct.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The Sexual Boredom Index (SBI) is organized as follows:

• Test Type: Original psychometric self-report rating scale.
• Construct Assessed: State sexual boredom experienced over the preceding month.
• Target Population: Adults aged 18 years and older (validated with participants aged 18–94) of all gender identities and sexual orientations who have engaged in sexual activity.
• Number of Items: 6 items.
• Administration Format: Paper-and-pencil or digital self-administration (typically takes 1–2 minutes to complete).
• Response Format: 5-point Likert scale:
  • 1 = Strongly disagree
  • 2 = Disagree
  • 3 = Neither agree nor disagree
  • 4 = Agree
  • 5 = Strongly agree
• Scoring Protocol: All items are positively keyed (higher agreement indicates higher sexual boredom). A total score is computed by summing the numerical ratings across all 6 items, yielding a composite score range of 6 to 30. Alternatively, a mean score can be derived by dividing the sum by 6 (ranging from 1.0 to 5.0). Higher scores indicate elevated levels of state sexual boredom, characterized by perceived monotony, mechanical routine, and emotional disconnection.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

• Publication Year: 2025 (Initial online advance publication 2024).
• Commercial Status: Non-commercial instrument.
• Fee: Free for academic, scientific research, and clinical diagnostic usage.
• Copyright & Permissions: The instrument was published under the copyright of the authors and the publisher, Taylor & Francis (Routledge), in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy. Researchers and healthcare practitioners wishing to use, reproduce, or translate the SBI for non-commercial research or clinical practice should consult the publisher’s reuse guidelines or contact the corresponding author, Dr. Leonor de Oliveira ([email protected]), for permission and standardized administrative protocols.

12. References

• Bancroft, J., & Janssen, E. (2000). The dual control model of male sexual response: A theoretical approach to centrally mediated erectile dysfunction. European Urology, 38(3), 257–264. https://doi.org/10.1159/000020295
• Danckert, J., & Merrifield, C. (2018). Boredom, boredom proneness, and mind wandering. In K. Christoff & P. C. Fox (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Spontaneous Thought: Mind-Wandering, Creativity, and Dreaming (pp. 377–398). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190464745.013.37
• de Oliveira, L., Rahm-Knigge, R., Ford, J., Coleman, E., & Mark, K. (2021). Conceptualizing sexual boredom: A qualitative investigation within an online community sample. Journal of Sexual Medicine, 18(Suppl 3), S142–S143.
• de Oliveira, L., Rahm-Knigge, R., Ford, J., Coleman, E., & Mark, K. (2025). Sexual Boredom Inventory (SBI): Development and initial validation. Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, 51(1), 74–84. https://doi.org/10.1080/0092623X.2024.2442944
• Eastwood, J. D., Frischen, A., Fenske, M. J., & Smilek, D. (2012). The unengaged mind: Defining boredom in terms of attention. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7(5), 482–495. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691612456044
• Gagnon, J. H., & Simon, W. (1973). Sexual Conduct: The Social Sources of Human Sexuality. Aldine Publishing Company.
• Kenny, D. A., Kaniskan, B., & McCoach, D. B. (2015). The performance of RMSEA in models with small degrees of freedom. Sociological Methods & Research, 44(3), 486–507. https://doi.org/10.1177/0049124114543236
• Watt, J. D., & Ewing, J. E. (1996). The development of the Sexual Boredom Scale. The Journal of Sex Research, 33(3), 211–222. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499609551837

13. Items of the Scale