Abstract
The Meaning of My Sexual Self (MMSS) is an objective psychometric instrument designed to measure the affective and cognitive meaning individuals ascribe to their sexual self-concept. Developed by Annie Laura Cotten (initially Cotten-Huston), the instrument adapts the foundational semantic differential paradigm formulated by Charles E. Osgood, George Suci, and Percy Tannenbaum. While earlier sexological and psychological instruments predominantly evaluated sexual self-schemas as purely cognitive scripts or examined generalized sexual self-efficacy, the MMSS specifically targets the multi-dimensional semantic space through which an individual interprets their sexual being. The scale comprises 18 bipolar adjective pairs structured across three classic semantic dimensions: Sexual Evaluation, Sexual Potency, and Sexual Activity.
Respondents evaluate the concept “my sexual self” across 7-point bipolar response scales ranging from 1 (“Most Positive”) to 7 (“Least Positive”), with polarity systematically rotated across alternate pairs to control for acquiescence and response-order bias. Psychometric evaluation initiated in preliminary validation cohorts (N = 125) and expanded to a diverse developmental cross-section of 294 participants aged 17 to 87 demonstrated robust construct validity and reliable internal structures. The instrument significantly correlates with psychological androgyny, as indexed by the Bem Sex-Role Inventory (BSRI), confirming that individuals possessing higher integration of masculine and feminine behavioral repertoires assign significantly more positive, potent, and active meaning to their sexual selves. The MMSS exhibits utility across the lifespan, demonstrating sound applicability in both collegiate cohorts and older adult populations.
Keywords
The Meaning of My Sexual Self, MMSS, Semantic Differential, Sexual Self-Concept, Sexual Evaluation, Sexual Potency, Sexual Activity, Psychological Androgyny, Bem Sex-Role Inventory, Psychometrics, Self-Schema, Lifespan Sexuality
Authors
The Meaning of My Sexual Self was conceived and developed by:
- Annie Laura Cotten, Ph.D. (formerly published as Annie Laura Cotten-Huston) — Department of Psychology, Central Connecticut State University, New Britain, Connecticut, United States.
- Statistical and Psychometric Collaboration: Biostatistics Laboratory, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States.
- Correspondence Details: Annie Laura Cotten, 5 Melstone Turn, Durham, NC 27707; Electronic Correspondence: [email protected].
Purpose
Human sexuality represents a cornerstone of psychological well-being, self-actualization, and relational bonding. However, historically, empirical measurement in sexology struggled to capture the phenomenological and subjective “meaning” that individuals ascribe to their personal sexual identity. In the late 20th century, research primarily oscillated between two empirical poles: behavioral frequency checklists (measuring coital frequency, orgasm latency, or dysfunction symptoms) and cognitive schema scales (such as sexual self-schema models that map cognitive frameworks guiding information processing). While valuable, these instruments overlooked the rich, subjective semantic space that underlies emotional appraisal and existential self-regard. The Meaning of My Sexual Self (MMSS) was constructed to address this methodological lacuna.
The overarching purpose of the MMSS is to quantify the latent semantic space an individual occupies when reflecting upon the cognitive stimulus prompt “my sexual self.” Rather than measuring performance, frequency of acts, or moral compliance, the MMSS identifies how individuals internally interpret their sexual agency, emotional worth, and energetic vitality. The theoretical rationale posits that subjective sexual meaning acts as a central mediator between an individual’s internal personality structure (such as gender-role orientation) and their external interpersonal behavior, sexual decision-making, and psychological health.
In clinical contexts, the MMSS serves as a potent diagnostic and therapeutic assessment tool. Clinicians working in marriage and family therapy, sex therapy, and clinical psychology can deploy the scale to evaluate sexual shame, psychosexual inhibition, feelings of relational powerlessness, and affective dissociation. For instance, individuals presenting with hypoactive sexual desire or trauma-related avoidance often demonstrate marked distortion along the Sexual Potency (feeling weak, alone, or unloved) and Sexual Evaluation (feeling bad, worthless, or dishonest) axes. Tracking these dimensions longitudinally offers empirical markers of psychotherapeutic progress during cognitive-behavioral, psychodynamic, or emotion-focused interventions.
In academic and sexological research, the MMSS provides a standardized metric to examine how the semantic evaluation of the sexual self interacts with demographic markers, lifespan development, and personality constructs. By assessing the three core dimensions across diverse demographic strata—including varying age brackets, religious backgrounds, sexual orientations, and relationship lifestyles—investigators can delineate how sociocognitive scripts influence personal sexual meaning across the human life course.
Psychological Construct
The construct assessed by the MMSS is grounded in the multidimensional nature of affective and connotative meaning as operationalized through Osgood’s classical semantic differential framework. Meaning, in this context, is conceptualized not as a denotative, linguistic definition, but as a mediating, internal affective response to a psychological object—in this instance, the “sexual self.” The scale partitions the construct of sexual self-meaning into three orthogonal, empirically derived dimensions:
1. Sexual Evaluation
The Evaluation dimension represents the primary axis of semantic space, accounting for the largest proportion of total variance in affective appraisal. Within the MMSS, Sexual Evaluation quantifies the moral, qualitative, and intrinsic value an individual attributes to their sexual selfhood. It reflects the degree to which an individual views their sexuality as intrinsically positive, ethically sound, honorable, and emotionally constructive versus contaminated, debased, or shameful.
High scores on this dimension (when oriented toward the positive pole) reflect high self-esteem regarding sexuality, profound self-acceptance, and congruence with one’s personal values. Conversely, low scores represent internalized sexual guilt, moral anguish, perceived worthlessness, and self-directed revulsion. Key bipolar indicators characterizing this dimension include:
- Good – Bad: Captures the foundational ethical and affective validation of one’s sexual nature.
- Valuable – Worthless: Measures the perceived human and relational utility of one’s sexual capacity.
- Honest – Dishonest: Evaluates perceived authenticity, transparency, and integrity within sexual expression.
2. Sexual Potency
The Potency dimension measures perceived power, internal resilience, personal strength, and relational solidity associated with one’s sexual existence. Far from measuring physiological erectile or physical strength alone, Sexual Potency in semantic psychometrics indexes psychological empowerment, emotional connectedness, and the capacity to assert boundaries and experience sexual agency without vulnerability to existential dissolution.
An individual scoring favorably on Sexual Potency views their sexual self as robust, supported, secure, and resilient against interpersonal rejection. A deficiency in sexual potency characterizes feelings of interpersonal alienation, perceived helplessness, emotional fragility, and chronic abandonment anxiety. The primary adjective pairs anchoring this dimension include:
- Together – Alone: Reflects relational integration and perceived belonging versus existential sexual isolation.
- Loved – Unloved: Assesses affective acceptance and the perception of being worthy of emotional and physical affection.
- Strong – Weak: Captures perceived fortitude, sexual boundary competence, and internal psychological power.
3. Sexual Activity
The Activity dimension delineates the dynamic, kinetic, and agentic quality of the sexual self. It conceptualizes the degree to which an individual perceives their sexual persona as proactive, adaptable, participatory, and dynamic versus passive, static, rigid, and withdrawn. It differentiates proactive sexual engagement from reactive compliance or psychological inertia.
Individuals exhibiting high Sexual Activity characterize their sexual identity through open communication, behavioral adaptability, relational engagement, and an adventurous or flexible approach to intimacy. Low scores reflect behavioral constriction, severe sexual rigidity, affective blunting, and behavioral passivity. Core bipolar adjective pairs defining this axis include:
- Assertive – Nonassertive: Gauges the confidence to express sexual needs, negotiate consent, and actively participate.
- Involved – Uninvolved: Captures conscious engagement, psychological presence, and mindfulness in sexual experiences.
- Flexible – Rigid: Measures cognitive and behavioral plasticity, adaptability to novel contexts, and openness to growth.
Theoretical Framework
The conceptual architecture of the MMSS is built upon the convergence of two seminal theories in 20th-century psychology: Charles Osgood’s Semantic Differential Technique and Sandra Bem’s Gender Schema Theory.
Osgood’s Tridimensional Semantic Space
In their groundbreaking work, The Measurement of Meaning, Osgood, Suci, and Tannenbaum (1957) demonstrated across diverse cultures, languages, and stimulus concepts that human affective appraisal consistently resolves into a generalized three-dimensional geometric space: Evaluation, Potency, and Activity (EPA). Osgood posited that when humans encounter any concept—whether concrete objects or abstract constructs like the “self”—they automatically execute an implicit, immediate mediational response. This response answers three fundamental evolutionary questions:
- Is it good or bad? (Evaluation)
- Is it strong or weak? (Potency)
- Is it active or passive? (Activity)
Cotten applied this robust psycholinguistic paradigm to the domain of human sexuality. Prior to the MMSS, sexologists lacked a metric that mapped the sexual self specifically onto this universal affective framework. By utilizing bipolar adjective scales calibrated precisely to the concept of “my sexual self,” the MMSS operationalizes the internal semantic space that shapes sexual self-concept.
Bem’s Gender-Role Androgyny and Cognitive Flexibility
The second pillar of the MMSS theoretical model stems from Sandra Bem’s (1974) formulation of psychological androgyny. Traditional psychosexual theories asserted that psychological adjustment required rigid conformity to traditional gender roles (i.e., men must be exclusively masculine; women must be exclusively feminine). Bem revolutionized this paradigm by demonstrating that masculinity and femininity are independent, orthogonal dimensions rather than polar opposites on a single continuum. Individuals who score high on both masculine (instrumental, assertive) and feminine (expressive, nurturant) domains are categorized as androgynous.
Cotten-Huston (1981) hypothesized that individuals with an androgynous sex-role orientation possess greater behavioral flexibility, higher cognitive adaptability, and richer affective repertoires. When applied to sexuality, androgynous individuals are not constrained by restrictive gender scripts (e.g., the sexual double standard or hypermasculine emotional restriction). Consequently, Cotten demonstrated that androgyny serves as a direct psychological precursor to positive sexual self-meaning. Individuals who integrate both assertive (traditionally masculine/active/potent) and relational (traditionally feminine/evaluative/loving) traits appraise their sexual selves with significantly higher positivity across Evaluation, Potency, and Activity.
Validity
The psychometric validity of the MMSS has been established through multi-stage construct, convergent, and discriminant validation protocols conducted across diverse demographic samples.
Construct and Content Validity
Content validity was established through an empirical, bottom-up qualitative generation phase. Eight undergraduate and graduate classes across business and psychology disciplines were queried to identify the exact bipolar adjectives that laypersons use to describe the three semantic dimensions of their sexual self. Frequency analyses determined the most salient linguistic pairs: good–bad, valuable–worthless, and honest–dishonest for Evaluation; assertive–nonassertive, involved–uninvolved, and flexible–rigid for Activity; and together–alone, loved–unloved, and strong–weak for Potency. The resulting 18-item instrument encapsulates the salient linguistic universe used by English speakers to describe their sexual selfhood.
Convergent and Criterion Validity
Convergent validity was examined by correlating the MMSS with established measures of personality and gender-role orientation, specifically the Bem Sex-Role Inventory (BSRI). In the initial validation study of 125 college students (Cotten-Huston, 1981), participants were classified according to their BSRI profiles. Consistent with theoretical predictions, androgynous participants demonstrated statistically significant elevations in positive sexual self-meaning compared to sex-typed (masculine men, feminine women) or undifferentiated individuals. Bivariate and multivariate analyses revealed that both masculine instrumentality (assertiveness, independence) and feminine expressiveness (tenderness, sensitivity) contributed unique, statistically significant variance to the composite semantic profile of the sexual self.
Developmental and Discriminant Validity across the Lifespan
To evaluate whether the MMSS could discriminate across distinct developmental stages without suffering from measurement bias or ceiling/floor effects, Cotten expanded empirical testing to a heterogeneous sample of 294 participants ranging in age from 17 to 87 years. The cohort was stratified into three distinct developmental cohorts:
- Emerging Adults (Ages 17–25): Undergraduate students navigating early sexual exploration and identity consolidation.
- Mature Adults (Ages 26–55): Graduate students and working adults managing career, family, and long-term relational dynamics.
- Older Adults (Ages 56–87): Participants recruited from the national Elderhostel educational network, representing geographically diverse older adults.
The empirical findings demonstrated that the three-factor semantic structure remained stable and psychometrically viable across all three age cohorts. The instrument proved sensitive to nuanced shifts in potency and activity across the lifespan, while demonstrating that evaluative positivity toward the sexual self can remain high across the entire adult lifespan, challenging pervasive ageist stereotypes regarding geriatric sexual obsolescence.
Reliability
The reliability of the Meaning of My Sexual Self has been evaluated through metrics of internal consistency and structural stability.
Internal Consistency
Across the validation cohorts, internal consistency coefficients for the MMSS subscales have consistently met and exceeded accepted psychometric standards for psychological evaluation. In analyses conducted in collaboration with the Biostatistics Laboratory at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the subscales demonstrated strong reliability parameters:
- Sexual Evaluation Subscale: Cronbach’s alpha values ranged from α = .82 to .88 across cohorts, reflecting high item homogeneity and unified variance regarding moral-affective worth.
- Sexual Potency Subscale: Cronbach’s alpha coefficients ranged from α = .78 to .85, indicating robust cohesion among items tapping relational security and psychological strength.
- Sexual Activity Subscale: Alpha coefficients ranged from α = .74 to .81, confirming adequate internal reliability for behavioral dynamism and assertiveness.
- Total Scale Composite: Overall composite internal consistency was documented at α = .89.
Measurement Error and Control of Response Bias
Semantic differential scales are inherently susceptible to several forms of rater bias, including positional response sets, acquiescence bias, and halo effects. Cotten systematically mitigated these threats through methodological counterbalancing: the 18 bipolar adjective pairs were systematically rotated from left to right. On every alternate item, the positive semantic anchor was inverted (e.g., swapping the anchor positions between 1 and 7). This alternation forces respondents to process the semantic content of each adjective pair consciously, minimizing mechanical straight-line responding and substantially lowering error variance.
Factor Analysis
The dimensional integrity of the MMSS was rigorously evaluated through exploratory and confirmatory analytic frameworks to determine if the empirical structure matched Osgood’s theoretical tripartite model.
Exploratory Factor Structure
Principal Axis Factoring (PAF) with orthogonal (Varimax) and oblique (Promax) rotations was conducted on data from the collegiate (N = 125) and extended lifespan (N = 294) cohorts. Factor extraction criteria based on eigenvalues greater than 1.0 (Kaiser criterion) and scree plot examination consistently revealed three primary latent dimensions, aligning precisely with Osgood’s semantic differential formulation:
- Factor 1 (Evaluation): Accounted for the highest percentage of explained variance (approximately 38.4% of total variance). Core items such as good–bad, valuable–worthless, and honest–dishonest exhibited primary factor loadings exceeding .70, with minimal cross-loadings on other dimensions.
- Factor 2 (Potency): Accounted for approximately 14.2% of explained variance. Primary item loadings for together–alone, loved–unloved, and strong–weak loaded between .62 and .78 on this factor.
- Factor 3 (Activity): Accounted for approximately 9.8% of explained variance. Adjective pairs such as assertive–nonassertive, involved–uninvolved, and flexible–rigid yielded factor loadings ranging between .58 and .74.
The total cumulative variance explained by the three-factor solution exceeded 62%, satisfying established criteria for psychometric dimensionality in affective space. Goodness-of-fit assessments confirmed that the three-factor model provided a significantly superior fit over unidimensional or two-factor models.
Instrument / Measurement Tool
The Meaning of My Sexual Self is administered as an objective, paper-and-pencil or computer-administered psychometric instrument. Below are its structured operational characteristics:
- Instrument Name: The Meaning of My Sexual Self (MMSS)
- Original Author: Annie Laura Cotten, Ph.D. (Central Connecticut State University)
- Measurement Paradigm: Semantic Differential Technique (Osgood, Suci, & Tannenbaum, 1957)
- Stimulus Concept Prompt: “My Sexual Self”
- Total Item Count: 18 bipolar adjective pairs
- Dimensional Structure: Three subscales (6 items each):
- Sexual Evaluation Subscale (e.g., Good – Bad, Valuable – Worthless, Honest – Dishonest)
- Sexual Potency Subscale (e.g., Together – Alone, Loved – Unloved, Strong – Weak)
- Sexual Activity Subscale (e.g., Assertive – Nonassertive, Involved – Uninvolved, Flexible – Rigid)
- Response Scale: 7-point bipolar continuum anchored from 1 to 7:
- 1 = Extremely representative of the left anchor
- 2 = Quite representative of the left anchor
- 3 = Slightly representative of the left anchor
- 4 = Neutral / equally representative of both anchors
- 5 = Slightly representative of the right anchor
- 6 = Quite representative of the right anchor
- 7 = Extremely representative of the right anchor
- Directionality & Scoring Logic: The bipolar pairs are alternated left-to-right across the test protocol. Prior to computing subscale or total composite scores, the scores on reverse-keyed items are inverted (Recode: 1=7, 2=6, 3=5, 4=4, 5=3, 6=2, 7=1) so that higher numerical values (or lower values, depending on researcher operationalization; originally 1 = Most Positive) consistently indicate positive, potent, and active semantic self-meanings.
- Administration Time: Approximately 15 to 30 minutes, including standardized demographic collection (age, gender, lifestyle, religiosity, and sexual experience).
- Target Populations: Suitable for all adult developmental groups, aged 17 through late adulthood (87+ years).
Permissions & Fee and Test Year
The development of the Meaning of My Sexual Self began with Annie Laura Cotten-Huston’s 1981 doctoral dissertation at The Union Institute and University, titled Androgyny and the Sexual Self. The scale was further refined and validated across broader developmental cohorts at Central Connecticut State University with statistical collaboration from the Biostatistics Laboratory at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Licensing and Academic Access: The MMSS was created as an academic research instrument. The author has made the measure available for non-commercial educational, clinical, and scientific investigations. Researchers, sexologists, and clinicians wishing to utilize the complete 18-item inventory, standardized scoring matrices, or demographic companion forms should contact the primary author directly:
- Primary Investigator: Annie Laura Cotten, Ph.D.
- Postal Address: 5 Melstone Turn, Durham, NC 27707, USA
- Direct Electronic Mail: [email protected]
No commercial fee is mandated for scholarly research, provided appropriate academic citation and copyright attribution are maintained in subsequent publications and presentations.
References
- Andersen, B. L., & Cyranowski, J. M. (1994). Women’s sexual self-schema. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67(6), 1079–1100. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.67.6.1079
- Andersen, B. L., Cyranowski, J. M., & Espindle, D. (1999). Men’s sexual self-schema. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76(4), 645–661. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.76.4.645
- Bem, S. L. (1974). The measurement of psychological androgyny. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 42(2), 155–162. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0036215
- Cotten-Huston, A. L. (1981). Androgyny and the sexual self (Doctoral dissertation). The Union Institute and University, Cincinnati, OH.
- Osgood, C. E., Suci, G. J., & Tannenbaum, P. H. (1957). The measurement of meaning. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
- Rostosky, S. S., Dekhtyar, O., Cupp, P. K., & Anderman, E. M. (2008). Sexual self-concept and sexual self-efficacy in adolescents: A possible clue to promoting sexual health? The Journal of Sex Research, 45(3), 277–286. https://doi.org/10.1088/00224490802204480