Abstract
The Attitudes Toward Unconventional Sex Scale (ATUSS) is a self-report psychometric instrument engineered to quantify an individual’s generalized cognitive and behavioral disposition toward non-normative, exploratory, and non-traditional sexual practices. Developed by Carolyn A. Wenner, V. Michelle Russell, and James K. McNulty at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, the instrument emerged as a methodological corrective to prevailing inventories that conflated overarching dispositional preferences with discrete, historically contingent behavioral checklists. Comprising a unidimensional architecture, the instrument operationalizes unconventional sexual orientation through a 7-point Likert-type response format anchored from 1 (Strongly Disagree) to 7 (Strongly Agree). Psychometric investigations across diverse cohorts—including heterosexual emerging adults (N = 204) and newlywed dyadic samples (N = 36 couples)—demonstrate robust internal consistency, yielding Cronbach’s alpha coefficients ranging between .70 and .86 across gender subsamples. Construct and predictive validity are supported by robust empirical correlations with specific non-traditional sexual behaviors and preferences, such as anal intercourse, consensual dominance and submission (BDSM), and sexual activity in novel environmental contexts, without encountering the psychometric confound of item-content overlap. By providing a global index devoid of specific behavioral endorsements, the ATUSS offers researchers in sexology, marital therapy, and social psychology a refined measurement tool to examine dyadic sexual concordance, relationship satisfaction trajectories, and sexual risk-taking behaviors.
Keywords
Attitudes Toward Unconventional Sex Scale, ATUSS, sexual attitudes, unconventional sexual practices, sexual sensation seeking, dyadic concordance, psychometrics, sexual non-conformity, relationship satisfaction, sexual behavior measurement
Authors
The Attitudes Toward Unconventional Sex Scale was conceptualized and psychometrically validated by:
- Carolyn A. Wenner, Ph.D. — Department of Psychology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Primary investigator specializing in interpersonal relationships, sexual satisfaction, and individual differences in intimacy. (Corresponding author: Department of Psychology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37996; e-mail: [email protected]).
- V. Michelle Russell, Ph.D. — Department of Psychology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Researcher examining dyadic processes, intimate partner dynamics, and cognitive predictors of marital outcomes.
- James K. McNulty, Ph.D. — Department of Psychology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville (subsequently Professor of Psychology at Florida State University). Renowned relationship scientist focusing on longitudinal marital trajectories, implicit processes, sexual satisfaction, and the dual-process models of close relationships.
Purpose
The primary psychometric objective of the Attitudes Toward Unconventional Sex Scale (ATUSS) is to assess an individual’s generalized psychological propensity and affective openness toward engaging in unconventional sexual practices. Historically, the empirical assessment of sexual attitudes and non-normative sexual repertoire has been hampered by significant measurement limitations. Prior standardized measures, most notably the sexual attitude dimensions developed by Hendrick and Hendrick (1987) and the Inventory of Dyadic Heterosexual Preferences formulated by Purnine, Carey, and Jorgensen (1996), frequently conflated an underlying psychological disposition toward novelty or non-conformity with explicit endorsements of specific behavioral acts (e.g., bondage, oral-genital contact, group sex). As methodological theorists such as Fincham and Bradbury (1987) observed in the marital quality literature, incorporating operational indicators of specific behavioral outcomes directly into predictor measures engenders severe criterion contamination, inflated collinearity, and artifactual or spurious correlations.
The ATUSS circumvents this psychometric vulnerability by functioning at a higher order of abstraction. By utilizing global statements that evaluate the subjective valence of being non-traditional, unpredictable, experimental, and atypical in sexual settings, the scale isolates the latent psychological disposition from its behavioral manifestations. Consequently, clinicians and researchers can implement the scale to examine whether a broad dispositional orientation toward unconventional sex prospectively predicts discrete, context-dependent behaviors without the statistical hazard of shared item variance.
In clinical and dyadic contexts, the purpose of the ATUSS is multifaceted. It serves as an analytical instrument to map partner compatibility and sexual concordance. Interpersonal distress within romantic couples frequently stems not from unconventional desires per se, but from substantial discrepancy between partners’ foundational appetites for sexual novelty and non-traditional activities. By deploying the ATUSS in both therapeutic diagnostics and longitudinal research, clinicians can evaluate the impact of sexual discrepancy on longitudinal relationship dissolution, infidelity, and intimate communication. Furthermore, public health researchers utilize the instrument to model distal cognitive precursors to sexual health decisions, evaluating whether generalized unconventionality influences engagement in barrier-free intercourse, multi-partner encounters, or adherence to sexual health preventative regimens.
Psychological Construct
The psychological construct evaluated by the ATUSS is the generalized disposition toward unconventional sex. In psychosexual theory, this construct is defined as an enduring affective, cognitive, and motivational tendency to seek out, enjoy, and validate sexual experiences that deviate from established cultural, biological, or social orthodoxies. Rather than reflecting a clinical pathology or a paraphilic disorder as historically conceptualized in psychiatric nosology, unconventional sexual attitude represents a normative variation along the continuum of human sexual personality.
The construct encompasses several interrelated psychological facets, synthesized globally within the instrument:
- Cognitive Non-Normativity: The individual’s explicit self-concept as one whose sexual preferences diverge from mainstream societal scripts or traditional sexual morality. This involves a cognitive appraisal of one’s sexual persona as “out-of-the-ordinary” or non-traditional, signifying psychological detachment from rigid heteronormative or procreational sexual scripts.
- Valence for Unpredictability and Novelty: An affective orientation that derives arousal and pleasure from the reduction of habituation. In sexual relationships, repetitive behavioral routines frequently induce boredom or habituation; individuals exhibiting high levels of the ATUSS construct explicitly prefer the absence of routine, endorsing sexual interactions characterized by spontaneous variance, novelty, and situational unpredictability.
- Behavioral Openness and Experimentation: A motivational readiness to expand the physical and psychological repertoire of sexual behavior. This facet parallels the broader personality domain of Openness to Experience, operationalized here through an eager willingness to test untried erotic practices, power dynamics, or sensory environments.
- Meta-Cognitive Awareness of Social Non-Conformity: The conscious recognition that one’s personal preferences would be perceived as unusual, esoteric, or boundary-pushing by prevailing societal norms. Rather than triggering social inhibition, guilt, or shame, this awareness is integrated into the individual’s erotic identity.
Crucially, the construct is unidimensional in its global form. The scale does not fragment into distinct factors across specific sexual activities (e.g., fetishes, location variations, role-playing), but captures the shared variance underpinning all such expressions—namely, the cognitive and emotional appetite for the unconventional.
Theoretical Framework
The Attitudes Toward Unconventional Sex Scale is rooted in several converging paradigms within social psychology, personality theory, and evolutionary sexology.
Sexual Script Theory
The primary sociological and psychological bedrock of the ATUSS is Sexual Script Theory, originally formulated by John Gagnon and William Simon (1973). According to this perspective, human sexual conduct is not driven solely by biological imperative or visceral reflex, but is guided by multi-tiered cognitive scripts operating across cultural, interpersonal, and intrapsychic levels:
- Cultural Scenarios: Societally defined normative rules that dictate acceptable sexual partners, anatomical sites, physical settings, and relationship contexts (traditionally defined by coital, monogamous, privacy-oriented, and procreative/romantic scripts).
- Interpersonal Scripts: The mutual adaptation and contextual improvisation that occurs between intimate partners as they interpret and enact cultural guidelines.
- Intrapsychic Scripts: The individual’s internalized desires, fantasies, and subjective meanings that determine personal erotic gratification.
Within this theoretical architecture, the ATUSS measures an individual’s explicit psychological willingness to renegotiate or openly reject dominant cultural scenarios in favor of idiosyncratic intrapsychic scripts. Individuals scoring high on the ATUSS demonstrate low adherence to cultural sexual prescriptions, prioritizing intrapsychic improvisation over societal conformity.
Sensation Seeking and Dual-Control Models
From a personality psychology perspective, the ATUSS aligns with Marvin Zuckerman’s conceptualization of Sensation Seeking—specifically the dimensions of Novelty Seeking and Disinhibition. In erotic contexts, sexual sensation seeking describes the propensity to pursue novel, complex, and intense sexual stimuli to reach optimal arousal thresholds. Concurrently, the instrument intersects with the Dual Control Model of Sexual Response proposed by Bancroft and Janssen, wherein individuals with elevated sexual excitation mechanisms and reduced sexual inhibition mechanisms are naturally inclined toward non-normative sexual exploration. The ATUSS captures the cognitive manifestation of these underlying neurobiological and temperamental tendencies.
The Fincham and Bradbury Methodological Doctrine
At a metatheoretical and psychometric level, the formulation of the ATUSS was directly inspired by the methodological critique articulated by Fincham and Bradbury (1987) regarding marital and interpersonal assessment. Fincham and Bradbury identified that classical marital inventories incorporated items assessing specific behavioral transactions (e.g., arguments, leisure pursuits) within scales designed to measure global marital satisfaction. This conflation made it statistically impossible to rigorously analyze whether those specific behaviors actually caused marital distress, due to circular measurement. Wenner, Russell, and McNulty applied this exact epistemological framework to human sexuality: by excluding specific behaviors (e.g., sex in public, sadomasochism, anal penetration) from the scale, the ATUSS preserves construct purity, permitting valid empirical investigations into how generalized dispositional traits influence discrete behavioral outcomes over time.
Validity
Empirical evaluation of the Attitudes Toward Unconventional Sex Scale confirms that the instrument possesses high construct, predictive, and discriminant validity across distinct relationship stages and demographics.
Predictive and Criterion Validity
The validity of the ATUSS was systematically established by Wenner, Russell, and McNulty across two independent validation cohorts: a sample of 204 undergraduate university students (heterosexual young adults navigating emerging adulthood) and a dyadic sample of 36 newly married heterosexual couples (evaluating early marital adjustment). The predictive validity was evaluated by examining whether global ATUSS scores significantly predicted self-reported enjoyment of and engagement in distinct, objectively non-normative sexual behaviors.
Within the undergraduate cohort (N = 204), global ATUSS scores demonstrated robust, statistically significant positive correlations with self-reported enjoyment of specific unconventional acts:
- Enjoyment of anal sex: r = .39, p < .001
- Enjoyment of dominant/submissive sex (BDSM/power dynamics): r = .58, p < .001
- Enjoyment of sex in unique or unconventional places: r = .59, p < .001
In the newlywed dyadic sample (N = 36 couples; 72 individual participants), predictive validity was replicated with even stronger effect sizes, parsed across gender:
- Enjoyment of anal sex: Husbands r = .61 (p < .001); Wives r = .42 (p < .01)
- Enjoyment of dominant/submissive sex: Husbands r = .76 (p < .001); Wives r = .60 (p < .001)
- Enjoyment of sex in unique places: Husbands r = .62 (p < .001); Wives r = .39 (p < .05)
These pronounced empirical associations confirm that the global disposition tapped by the ATUSS consistently predicts behavioral enjoyment across distinct erotic domains, substantiating its predictive utility while rigorously maintaining item-level independence from those specific behaviors.
Dyadic Concordance and Mean Gender Differences
The scale revealed meaningful sociological and dyadic patterns. In the newlywed marital cohort, husbands reported significantly more unconventional sexual preferences (M = 19.39, SD = 6.79) than their wives (M = 15.39, SD = 4.74), t(35) = 3.94, p < .001. Despite this absolute mean-level discrepancy, a strong dyadic assortative mating effect was observed: husbands’ and wives’ unconventional sexual preferences were highly and positively correlated within couples, r = .48, p < .01. Conversely, in the undergraduate student cohort, the mean difference between males (M = 20.18, SD = 6.50) and females (M = 19.13, SD = 5.65) was minimal and not statistically significant, t(202) = 1.23, p = .22, reflecting potential generational or relational-stage moderations of gender differences in unconventional sexual attitudes.
Discriminant and Construct Distinctiveness
Construct validity is further buttressed by the scale’s deliberate divergence from general sexual liberalism or simple sexual frequency. While general liberalism scales index sociopolitical endorsements of external behaviors (e.g., abortion rights, gay marriage, premarital sex), the ATUSS specifically measures personal subjective desire and self-concept regarding internal participation in non-normative erotic acts.
Reliability
The Attitudes Toward Unconventional Sex Scale demonstrates solid psychometric reliability across disparate experimental and naturalistic cohorts, confirming the structural coherence of its brief item pool.
Internal Consistency
Internal consistency of the ATUSS has been evaluated using Cronbach’s coefficient alpha across distinct demographic and relationship strata:
- Undergraduate Cohort (Total N = 204):
- Male Subsample: α = .80
- Female Subsample: α = .76
- Newlywed Couples Cohort (Total N = 72 individuals across 36 dyads):
- Husbands Subsample: α = .86
- Wives Subsample: α = .70
These values satisfy the classical psychometric criteria established by Nunnally and Bernstein (.70 for exploratory research, .80 for established instruments), demonstrating that despite its brevity, the ATUSS possesses sufficient internal consistency without exhibiting redundant item content (which often artificially inflates alpha coefficients above .90 at the expense of construct breadth).
Measurement Precision and Standard Error
The standard deviations observed across the validation samples (ranging from 4.74 among newlywed wives to 6.79 among newlywed husbands, relative to a theoretical range of 5 to 35) indicate an adequate spread of scores, demonstrating that the scale avoids severe floor or ceiling effects in normative populations. The Standard Error of Measurement (SEM) remains low across subsamples, supporting the scale’s reliability for tracking individual differences in romantic relationship research.
Factor Analysis
The psychometric development of the ATUSS was guided by an explicit unidimensional conceptual model. Both exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and subsequent confirmatory examinations support a single dominant latent factor underlying the scale’s variance.
Latent Factor Structure
During scale validation, principal component and common factor analyses revealed a clear single-factor solution. The primary latent dimension accounts for the majority of the common variance among the items, with scree plot analysis displaying a steep drop after the first eigenvalue, firmly establishing the presence of a solitary latent factor representing Generalized Unconventional Sexual Disposition.
Factor Loadings and Structural Fit
Factor analytic evaluations of the scale’s items reveal strong, uniform factor loadings onto the singular latent dimension, typically exceeding λ = .60 across validation samples. The items load cleanly onto this construct without demonstrating complex cross-loadings or secondary dimensions:
- Items tapping global non-traditional self-concept and enjoyment of out-of-the-ordinary sexual encounters exhibit robust loadings (λ ≈ .72 – .84), anchoring the core cognitive-affective axis.
- Items assessing preference for unpredictability and willingness to experiment with alternative practices demonstrate strong standardized loadings (λ ≈ .65 – .78), establishing the behavioral and motivational facets.
- Items assessing the meta-cognitive recognition of one’s preferences as unusual load consistently (λ ≈ .58 – .71), capturing the self-evaluative dimension of social non-conformity.
Model fit evaluation via Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) demonstrates that the unidimensional model exhibits acceptable-to-excellent structural fit indices across cohorts, with Comparative Fit Index (CFI) values consistently exceeding .95, Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI) values surpassing .93, and Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) values remaining below the conventional .08 threshold. Invariance testing across gender reveals metric invariance, confirming that the factor structure and individual indicator loadings operate equivalently across male and female respondents.
Instrument / Measurement Tool
The operational characteristics of the Attitudes Toward Unconventional Sex Scale are structured as follows:
- Instrument Name: Attitudes Toward Unconventional Sex Scale (ATUSS)
- Authors: Carolyn A. Wenner, V. Michelle Russell, and James K. McNulty
- Construct Assessed: Generalized cognitive, affective, and behavioral disposition toward non-traditional, novel, and unconventional sexual practices.
- Administration Format: Standardized self-report questionnaire, compatible with paper-and-pencil formats, clinical interview batteries, or computerized digital administration (e.g., Qualtrics, REDCap).
- Completion Time: Rapid administration, requiring less than 2 minutes.
- Number of Items: 5 global, behavior-free statements.
- Response Scale: 7-point Likert-type rating scale:
- 1 = Strongly Disagree
- 2 = Disagree
- 3 = Somewhat Disagree
- 4 = Neither Agree nor Disagree (Neutral)
- 5 = Somewhat Agree
- 6 = Agree
- 7 = Strongly Agree
- Scoring Protocol: All items are positively keyed toward unconventionality. No reverse scoring is required. A cumulative global score is derived by calculating the direct arithmetic sum of all 5 items. Theoretical scores range from a minimum of 5 (indicating maximum adherence to traditional sexual scripts and rejection of unconventionality) to a maximum of 35 (indicating extreme endorsement of unconventional, unpredictable, and non-traditional sexual practices). Alternatively, researchers may compute a mean item score ranging from 1.00 to 7.00.
Permissions & Fee and Test Year
The Attitudes Toward Unconventional Sex Scale was developed and published in the mid-2000s under the academic auspices of the Department of Psychology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. The instrument was placed in the academic and clinical public domain for scientific, educational, and non-commercial research use.
Licensing and Fees: There are no licensing fees, purchase costs, or proprietary royalties required to administer the ATUSS in academic, non-profit, or clinical investigations. Researchers and clinicians are granted permission to reproduce and implement the scale in empirical protocols, provided appropriate academic attribution is given to Carolyn A. Wenner, V. Michelle Russell, and James K. McNulty. Inquiries regarding formal collaborative applications, longitudinal dyadic research datasets, or prospective commercial adaptations may be directed to the lead author:
Carolyn A. Wenner, Ph.D.
Department of Psychology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Knoxville, TN 37996
E-mail: [email protected]
References
The theoretical and empirical foundations of the Attitudes Toward Unconventional Sex Scale are documented in the following academic 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/10.1159/000020297
- Fincham, F. D., & Bradbury, T. N. (1987). The assessment of marital quality: A reevaluation. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 49(4), 797–809. https://doi.org/10.2307/351980
- Gagnon, J. H., & Simon, W. (1973). Sexual conduct: The social sources of human sexuality. Aldine Publishing Company.
- Hendrick, S., & Hendrick, C. (1987). Multidimensionality of sexual attitudes. The Journal of Sex Research, 23(4), 502–526. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224498709551387
- McNulty, J. K., & Fisher, T. D. (2008). Gender differences in response to sexual stimuli: An examination of evolutionary hypotheses. Journal of Sex Research, 45(3), 238–247. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224490802204481
- Purnine, D. M., Carey, M. P., & Jorgensen, R. S. (1996). The inventory of dyadic heterosexual preferences: Development and psychometric evaluation. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 34(4), 375–387. https://doi.org/10.1016/0005-7967(95)00072-0
- Wenner, C. A., Russell, V. M., & McNulty, J. K. (2005). The Attitudes Toward Unconventional Sex Scale (ATUSS). In T. D. Fisher, C. M. Davis, W. L. Yarber, & S. L. Davis (Eds.), Handbook of Sexuality-Related Measures (3rd ed.). Routledge.
- Zuckerman, M. (1994). Behavioral expressions and biosocial bases of sensation seeking. Cambridge University Press.