Sexuality Scale

1. Abstract

The Sexuality Scale (SS) is a landmark 30-item self-report psychometric instrument developed by William E. Snell, Jr. and Dennis R. Papini in 1989 to evaluate three fundamental psychological dimensions of human sexual self-concept: sexual esteem, sexual depression, and sexual preoccupation. Historically, clinical sexology and psychological research operationalized sexual functioning primarily through physiological parameters, behavioral frequencies, or global personality indices. The Sexuality Scale addressed this critical gap by conceptualizing sexuality as a multifaceted subjective domain comprising affective, evaluative, and cognitive orientations toward one’s sexual persona and interpersonal functioning. Administered across a 5-point Likert-type agreement continuum ranging from +2 (Agree) to −2 (Disagree), the instrument yields three discrete subscale scores: a 10-item Sexual Esteem subscale (theoretical range: −20 to +20), an 8-item Sexual Depression subscale (theoretical range: −16 to +16, with two items treated as unscored filler items due to factor loadings below .20), and a 10-item Sexual Preoccupation subscale (theoretical range: −20 to +20). Psychometric investigations demonstrate robust internal consistency (Cronbach’s α ranging from .88 to .94 across subscales and sexes) and test-retest reliability across multi-week intervals ranging from .67 to .76. Principal components factor analysis with orthogonal varimax rotation confirms a three-factor latent architecture accounting for substantial common variance. The scale exhibits strong convergent, discriminant, and criterion-related validity, correlating predictably with measures of self-esteem, generalized depression, sexual satisfaction, sexual guilt, and behavioral intimacy patterns. An abbreviated 15-item short-form developed by Wiederman and Allgeier (1993) maintains excellent psychometric integrity. This comprehensive review synthesizes the theoretical foundations, structural composition, diagnostic utility, and clinical applications of the Sexuality Scale in contemporary sex research and therapeutic assessment.

2. Keywords

Sexuality Scale, sexual esteem, sexual depression, sexual preoccupation, sexual self-concept, William E. Snell Jr., Dennis R. Papini, psychometrics, sexual health, sex therapy, sexual dysfunction, self-efficacy

3. Authors

The Sexuality Scale was conceptualized, designed, and empirically validated by William E. Snell, Jr., Ph.D., and Dennis R. Papini, Ph.D.

• William E. Snell, Jr., Ph.D.: Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Southeast Missouri State University, Cape Girardeau, Missouri, United States. Dr. Snell has contributed extensively to social psychology, personality assessment, and clinical sexology, with specialized expertise in human sexuality, masculine role socialization, relationship communication, and multidimensional affect measurement. (Correspondence historically addressed to: Department of Psychology, Southeast Missouri State University, One University Plaza, Cape Girardeau, MO 63701; Email: [email protected]).
• Dennis R. Papini, Ph.D.: Developmental psychologist and academic administrator, whose research focus centers on adolescent psychosocial development, family system dynamics, parent-adolescent communication, and relationship intimacy.

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Sexuality Scale (SS) is to provide an objective, reliable, and construct-validated self-report measure of how individuals cognitively interpret and emotionally experience their personal sexuality. Before the development of the SS in the late 1980s, sexological research frequently relied on broad personality inventories (such as the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale or the Beck Depression Inventory) to make inferences regarding individuals’ sexual self-appraisals. However, global indices of affective functioning and self-worth often fail to capture domain-specific vulnerabilities, cognitive distortions, and competencies unique to erotic and romantic relationships. A person may exhibit high generalized self-esteem in professional and academic settings while simultaneously suffering severe feelings of incompetence, inadequacy, and dysphoria regarding sexual functioning.

To overcome the clinical and empirical limitations of generalized measures, Snell and Papini (1989) formulated the SS to capture three distinct, clinically meaningful facets of sexual self-concept. In research settings, the tool enables investigators to map individual differences in sexual self-schema, examine demographic and gender-role variations in sexual socialization, and identify psychosocial correlates of risky sexual behaviors, sexual avoidance, or relationship dissolution. In clinical psychology and couples therapy, the SS serves as a diagnostic baseline and progress-monitoring mechanism. By decomposing sexual self-concept into positive valence (esteem), negative affect (depression), and cognitive salience (preoccupation), clinicians can identify whether a client’s sexual dysfunction stems from performance anxiety and low efficacy, pervasive sexual dysphoria, or compulsive ruminative patterns.

Furthermore, the instrument has proven invaluable in outcome-based intervention research. For instance, in clinical trials evaluating behavioral therapies for female hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD) and orgasmic difficulties (e.g., Hurlbert et al., 1993), the Sexuality Scale provides quantifiable sensitivity to therapeutic gains, documenting how cognitive restructuring and couples-based intimacy training systematically elevate sexual esteem while dampening sexual depression.

5. Psychological Construct

The Sexuality Scale is built upon the construct of the sexual self-concept—defined as the cognitive and affective representation of oneself as a sexual human being. Snell and Papini (1989) conceptualized this multidimensional domain as encompassing three primary psychological dimensions:

Sexual Esteem

Sexual esteem represents an individual’s positive regard for, and confidence in, their capacity to experience their sexuality in an enjoyable, authentic, and emotionally satisfying manner. Grounded in principles of perceived self-efficacy, sexual esteem reflects an affirmative evaluation of one’s erotic competence, physical desirability, interpersonal sensitivity, and behavioral mastery within intimate encounters. Individuals with elevated sexual esteem view themselves as capable, gratifying, and worthwhile sexual partners. They approach erotic encounters with agency and anticipate mutual pleasure. Conversely, individuals scoring low on sexual esteem harbor profound self-doubts regarding their performance, physical attractiveness, or partner satisfaction, leading to anticipatory avoidance and spectatoring.

Sexual Depression

Sexual depression is characterized by acute or chronic feelings of sadness, dysphoria, despondency, and disappointment specifically anchored to one’s sexual experiences, performance, or overall intimate life. Unlike generalized clinical depression, which permeates across vegetative, somatic, and existential spheres, sexual depression represents a domain-bound affective disturbance. Individuals exhibiting high sexual depression experience sorrow, frustration, and hopelessness regarding past, present, or prospective sexual encounters. They frequently perceive their intimate relationships as disappointing failures and view their sexual needs as insurmountable sources of distress. This construct frequently intersects with sexual guilt, trauma, perceived sexual dysfunction, and chronic interpersonal alienation.

Sexual Preoccupation

Sexual preoccupation captures the cognitive salience and intrusive frequency of sexual ideation, reflecting a persistent tendency to dwell upon, fantasize about, and think about sex to an excessive or disproportionate degree. While human sexual desire naturally encompasses fantasies and episodic erotic focus, sexual preoccupation denotes an amplified cognitive absorption wherein sexual thoughts dominate waking consciousness and crowd out alternative cognitive domains. Within the Sexuality Scale’s conceptualization, preoccupation is not automatically pathological or synonymous with compulsive sexual behavior disorder; rather, its psychological meaning interacts with an individual’s underlying esteem and depression. In empirical studies, elevated preoccupation in men is frequently tethered to compensatory coping mechanisms or performance distress, whereas in women, preoccupation often demonstrates a direct positive association with heightened sexual esteem and erotic exploratory drive.

6. Theoretical Framework

The Sexuality Scale is anchored in several foundational paradigms of cognitive psychology, social learning theory, and personality science:

Self-Schema Theory

According to Hazel Markus’s self-schema theory, individuals actively organize, categorize, and integrate information about the self through domain-specific cognitive structures. These cognitive structures, or schemas, guide how individuals process social stimuli, interpret ambiguous interpersonal feedback, and retrieve self-relevant autobiographical memories. Snell and colleagues extended this cognitive framework into human sexuality by conceptualizing the sexual self-concept as a composite network of self-schemas. Under this model, an individual who maintains a positive sexual-esteem schema rapidly attends to, encodes, and recalls affirming erotic experiences, effectively buffering against situational rejection. In contrast, individuals operating under a depressogenic sexual schema preferentially encode perceived rejections, minor performance lapses, or partner disengagement as permanent confirmations of personal inadequacy.

Cognitive-Behavioral Models of Sexual Functioning

The scale integrates the cognitive-behavioral principles popularized by sex therapists Helen Singer Kaplan and Joseph LoPiccolo, as well as the dual-control model of sexual response. Cognitive-behavioral theory posits that sexual difficulties are rarely isolated physiological events; instead, they are generated and maintained by reciprocal interactions among automatic negative thoughts, physiological hyperarousal, and maladaptive avoidance behaviors. By decomposing the sexual persona into esteem, depression, and preoccupation, Snell and Papini provided a quantitative tool that maps directly onto the cognitive distortions (e.g., catastrophizing, mind-reading partner dissatisfaction) that precipitate sexual anxiety and clinical dysfunction.

Differential Socialization and Gender Roles

The theoretical framework of the SS explicitly accounts for gender-differentiated psychosexual socialization. Traditional cultural scripts historically socialized men toward sexual assertiveness, high frequency of desire, and performance-based validation, while socializing women toward relational intimacy, modesty, or reactive desire. The Sexuality Scale enabled researchers to empirically test whether these cultural scripts produced divergent cognitive architectures. Foundational findings confirmed that while men and women demonstrated equivalent mean levels of sexual esteem and sexual depression, men exhibited significantly higher sexual preoccupation, reflecting the enduring imprint of sociocultural reinforcement on erotic cognitive focus.

7. Validity

The psychometric validity of the Sexuality Scale has been extensively evaluated across clinical, community, and collegiate samples through construct, convergent, discriminant, and criterion-related investigations.

Construct and Factorial Validity

In the original validation investigation by Snell and Papini (1989), a sample of 296 university undergraduates completed the 30-item scale. Orthogonal principal components analysis established three distinct latent dimensions corresponding strictly to sexual esteem, sexual preoccupation, and sexual depression. The factor loading patterns confirmed that the three constructs represent distinct structural domains rather than opposite poles of a single unidimensional continuum. Further structural investigations by Wiederman and Allgeier (1993) corroborated the tripartite architecture, noting that the shortened 15-item variant retained clear factor separation with negligible cross-loadings.

Convergent Validity

Convergent validity has been established by correlating the SS subscales with theoretically allied constructs. Snell, Fisher, and Schuh (1992) demonstrated that Sexual Esteem correlates positively with generalized self-esteem, private body consciousness, sexual assertiveness, and erotic communication satisfaction. Conversely, Sexual Depression demonstrated strong positive correlations with generalized depressive symptom scores on the Beck Depression Inventory, state-trait anxiety, sexual anxiety, and internalized sexual guilt. The Sexual Preoccupation subscale correlated positively with behavioral measures of sexual activity, masturbation frequency, erotophilia, and sensation seeking.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity analyses confirm that the SS subscales assess specialized sexual cognitions rather than redundant reflections of generalized affect. In Snell et al. (1992), partial correlation analyses revealed that the inverse relationship between Sexual Esteem and Sexual Depression remained robust even when controlling for global self-esteem and generalized dysphoria. Furthermore, Sexual Preoccupation demonstrated near-zero correlations with social desirability scales, confirming that participants’ self-reported cognitive absorption in sex was not a statistical artifact of impression management or self-deceptive enhancement.

Predictive and Clinical Criterion Validity

The clinical utility of the SS was validated in applied therapy research. Hurlbert, White, Powell, and Apt (1993) administered the Sexuality Scale to women diagnosed with hypoactive sexual desire disorder undergoing orgasm consistency training across women-only and couples-only modalities. Pre- to post-treatment assessments documented statistically significant elevations in Sexual Esteem and significant reductions in Sexual Depression, mirroring verified clinical recovery and orgasmic frequency. These findings confirm the scale’s sensitivity to longitudinal therapeutic change.

8. Reliability

The Sexuality Scale demonstrates exceptional internal consistency across varied populations, age groups, and clinical settings.

Internal Consistency (Cronbach’s Alpha)

In the primary psychometric report by Snell and Papini (1989), Cronbach’s alpha coefficients for the 296 participants (209 females, 87 males; mean age approximately 23.5 years) yielded the following metrics:

• Sexual Esteem Subscale (10 items): α = .92 for women, .93 for men, and .92 for the aggregate sample.
• Sexual Depression Subscale (8 scored items): α = .88 for women, .94 for men, and .90 for the aggregate sample.
• Sexual Preoccupation Subscale (10 items): α = .88 for women, .79 for men, and .88 for the aggregate sample.

Replication studies by Snell, Fisher, and Schuh (1992) corroborated these high indices across independent samples, reporting alpha ranges of .90 to .92 for Sexual Esteem, .85 to .93 for Sexual Depression, and .87 to .91 for Sexual Preoccupation. In their psychometric refinement study, Wiederman and Allgeier (1993) tested the 15-item short form (5 items per subscale) and obtained alpha coefficients of .92 (men) and .94 (women) for Sexual Esteem, .89 (men) and .89 (women) for Sexual Depression, and .96 (men) and .92 (women) for Sexual Preoccupation, demonstrating that item reduction does not compromise scale reliability.

Test-Retest Stability

Temporal stability assessments conducted across multi-week test-retest intervals (Snell et al., 1992) yielded stability coefficients ranging from .69 to .74 for Sexual Esteem, .67 to .76 for Sexual Depression, and .70 to .76 for Sexual Preoccupation. These metrics demonstrate that while the scale reflects enduring dispositional self-schemas, it maintains sufficient elasticity to capture dynamic cognitive-affective shifts resulting from life transitions, relationship disruptions, or clinical interventions.

9. Factor Analysis

The factorial structure of the Sexuality Scale was established through exploratory principal components analysis (PCA) followed by an orthogonal Varimax rotation to achieve simple structure (Snell & Papini, 1989). A three-factor solution was specified a priori based on the conceptual distinctions among esteem, depression, and preoccupation:

Factor Extraction and Variance Decomposition

• Factor 1: Sexual Esteem. Exhibited an initial eigenvalue of 8.39, accounting for 56% of the common variance extracted. All 10 designated Sexual Esteem items loaded robustly onto this factor, with primary factor loadings ranging from .52 to .82 (mean loading = .69). Items such as “I am a good sexual partner” and “I would rate my sexual skill quite highly” anchored the positive pole, while reverse-scored items loaded symmetrically in the opposing direction.
• Factor 2: Sexual Preoccupation. Possessed an eigenvalue of 4.75, explaining 32% of the common variance. All 10 Sexual Preoccupation items loaded heavily onto this factor with coefficients ranging from .41 to .86 (mean loading = .65). Items defining this factor capture cognitive frequency (e.g., “I think about sex all the time”; “I tend to be preoccupied with sex”).
• Factor 3: Sexual Depression. Exhibited an eigenvalue of 1.88, accounting for 13% of the common variance. Of the 10 items originally written for this conceptual dimension, 8 items demonstrated robust factor loadings ranging from .48 to .84 (mean loading = .67). Two candidate items (Item 11: “Thinking about sex makes me happy”; Item 14: “I derive pleasure and enjoyment from sex”) yielded factor loadings under .20 on this dimension; Snell and Papini consequently designated these two items as unscored filler items in the 30-item protocol.

Independent Confirmatory Investigations

Subsequent psychometric examinations by Wiederman and Allgeier (1993) utilized confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) techniques. Their evaluations confirmed that the three-factor orthogonal model fit the empirical data significantly better than competing single-factor or two-factor models (e.g., combining esteem and depression into a general bipolar affect factor). The distinct cognitive separation of sexual preoccupation as an independent construct verified that cognitive frequency operates independently of emotional valence.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: Sexuality Scale (SS)
• Alternative Versions: 15-Item Sexuality Scale Short-Form (Wiederman & Allgeier, 1993)
• Target Population: Adults and adolescents aged 18 and older; suitable for clinical, non-clinical, and research cohorts
• Administration Format: Self-administered paper-and-pencil or computerized questionnaire
• Administration Time: Approximately 15 to 20 minutes for the full 30-item instrument; 5 to 7 minutes for the 15-item short-form
• Total Number of Items: 30 items total (28 scored items, 2 unscored filler items)
• Response Scale: 5-point Likert agreement continuum:
  • (A) Agree = +2
  • (B) Slightly agree = +1
  • (C) Neither agree nor disagree = 0
  • (D) Slightly disagree = −1
  • (E) Disagree = −2
• Subscale Composition and Item Allocations:
  • Sexual Esteem (10 items): Items 1, 4, 7, 10(R), 13(R), 16, 19(R), 22, 25(R), 28(R). Possible score range: −20 to +20.
  • Sexual Depression (8 scored items): Items 2, 5(R), 8, 17, 20, 23(R), 26, 29(R). (Items 11 and 14 are unweighted filler items). Possible score range: −16 to +16.
  • Sexual Preoccupation (10 items): Items 3, 6, 9(R), 12, 15, 18, 21(R), 24(R), 27(R), 30(R). Possible score range: −20 to +20.
  • Short-Form SS (15 items): Sexual Esteem (Items 1, 4, 16, 19R, 22); Sexual Depression (Items 2, 5R, 8, 17, 23R); Sexual Preoccupation (Items 3, 6, 12, 15, 18).
• Scoring Protocol:
  • Identify and reverse-score the 13 items designated with an “(R)” by multiplying the numerical rating by −1 (i.e., +2 becomes −2; +1 becomes −1; 0 remains 0; −1 becomes +1; −2 becomes +2).
  • Sum the item responses for each respective subscale.
  • Higher positive numerical values denote higher levels of sexual esteem, greater sexual depression, and greater sexual preoccupation, respectively.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Sexuality Scale was officially published in 1989 by William E. Snell, Jr. and Dennis R. Papini in The Journal of Sex Research. The instrument was designed as an open-access, non-commercial assessment tool for educational, clinical, and scientific research. In accordance with standard psychometric dissemination guidelines established by the primary author, the scale may be reproduced and administered without payment of royalty fees, provided proper formal academic citation is rendered to the authors and original publication sources. Researchers intending to incorporate the scale into clinical trial protocols, digital health platforms, or commercial psychometric batteries should verify academic attribution standards and contact the primary author or institutional copyright holders where applicable.

12. References

• Hurlbert, D. F., White, L. C., Powell, R. D., & Apt, C. (1993). Orgasm consistency training in the treatment of women reporting hypoactive sexual desire: An outcome comparison of women-only groups and couples-only groups. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 24(1), 3–13. https://doi.org/10.1016/0005-7916(93)90035-7
• Markus, H. (1977). Self-schemata and processing information about the self. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 35(2), 63–78. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.35.2.63
• Snell, W. E., Jr., Fisher, T. D., & Schuh, T. (1992). Reliability and validity of the Sexuality Scale: A measure of sexual-esteem, sexual-depression, and sexual-preoccupation. The Journal of Sex Research, 29(2), 261–273. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499209551646
• Snell, W. E., Jr., & Papini, D. R. (1989). The Sexuality Scale: An instrument to measure sexual-esteem, sexual-depression, and sexual-preoccupation. The Journal of Sex Research, 26(2), 256–263. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224498909551510
• Wiederman, M. W., & Allgeier, E. R. (1993). The measurement of sexual-esteem: Investigation of Snell and Papini’s (1989) Sexuality Scale. Journal of Research in Personality, 27(1), 88–102. https://doi.org/10.1006/jrpe.1993.1006

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)