It turns out people with emotional instability and mood swings report the most vivid sexual fantasies. That’s one conclusion from a study by researchers at Michigan State University (USA).
The team primarily wanted to know what sexual fantasies are like and how often people with different Big Five personality traits experience them.
The ‘Big Five’ is the most widely accepted model of human personality in modern psychology. Its core idea is that every person has five key traits expressed to varying degrees: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (negative emotionality).
The team hypothesized that sexual fantasies act as a psychological coping mechanism that helps people regulate their mood and avoid negative emotions.
What the researchers found
The study included 5,225 adults with a mean age of 58. More than half of the volunteers were men. Most participants were in long-term relationships that lasted on average 28 years. Over two-thirds of volunteers reported being sexually active at least once a month.
Participants answered a 30-question survey. Every six questions measured one of the Big Five traits. Volunteers also completed a detailed questionnaire about sexual fantasies covering 40 different topics. They rated each fantasy’s frequency on a scale from “never” to “daily.”
Topics were grouped into four categories:
- Exploratory: adventurous fantasies with an element of discovery.
- Intimate: fantasies focused on romance, for example making love outdoors.
- Impersonal: detached, observational fantasies.
- Sado-masochistic: fantasies involving dominance or submission.
Researchers concluded that sexual fantasies are extremely common; they occur across ages, genders, and types of relationships.
The results showed that higher conscientiousness was associated with a lower frequency of sexual fantasies across all four categories. At the same time, higher agreeableness correlated with a lower frequency of most types of fantasies.
The team found that people with high conscientiousness—responsible, disciplined, and organized—and people with high agreeableness generally have fewer sexual fantasies overall.
Extraversion showed only a weak association with the categories of fantasies. By contrast, people with higher levels of negative emotionality (neuroticism) more often reported sexual fantasies from all four categories.
In a PLOS One article, the scientists wrote that people high in neuroticism typically experience both more positive and more negative sexual thoughts, including fantasies about violence.
One surprising result was that people high in openness, especially those with creative imaginations, were less likely to report any sexual fantasies. The authors suggest this finding may reflect that open people more often fantasize about nonsexual topics.
Many of the links between personality traits and fantasies weakened after the researchers accounted for age, sex, and how the personality traits overlap with one another.
The researchers concluded that sexual fantasies can serve as a psychological diversion that helps people generate more positive or arousing thoughts.
However, the team acknowledged some limitations. The study relied entirely on self-reports, so the findings depend on how comfortable participants felt revealing their private thoughts.
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