Angela Weaver

St. Francis Xavier University

Women with poorer body image tend to report lower sexual well-being; yet, minimal research has examined interpersonal factors affecting women's body image in the context of sexual activity. We examined women's perceptions of the influence of relationship and partner factors on their body image during sexual activity with their male partner. Semi-st...

The continuity hypothesis suggests that dream content is directly related to waking life experiences, personality traits, and gender; however, little is known about sexual dreaming. To address this gap, the current study examined how gender, sociosexuality (one’s willingness to engage in sexual relations outside of committed relationships) and erot...

Slasher films, a popular and lucrative sub-genre of horror movie, are often thought to be characterized by violence, gratuitous sexual content and specific, repetitive tropes; however, although these tropes have been widely discussed and even parodied, there is scant research examining their validity. Thirty top-grossing slasher films (10 each for...

The goal of this study was to explore women’s perceptions of their body within the context of their sexual relationship with a male partner. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 16 young women (ages 19 to 29). Thematic analysis revealed that women described a fluctuating body image that influences their behaviour and experience of sexual...

Compulsive buying involves a preoccupation with, or urges to, buy, that are experienced as intrusive and uncontrollable. Compulsive buying is associated with impaired functioning and serves to alleviate negative emotional arousal. Anxiety sensitivity (AS: fear of arousal-related somatic sensations) is a known risk factor for negative emotional arou...

Mindfulness involves intentional, non-judgmental and accepting awareness of the present moment. People differ in terms of their level of dispositional mindfulness and can also engage in formal training to cultivate greater mindfulness. Despite a recent proliferation in research on mindfulness and its association with numerous aspects of psychologic...

High anxiety sensitivity (AS; fear of arousal-related bodily sensations) is a known risk factor for psychopathology and medical pathology. High AS individuals tend to avoid activities that induce feared arousal-related sensations; yet, few studies have examined AS and sexual activity, those that did have produced mixed results, and no study to date...

Mindfulness (tendency to attend to present experience without expectation or judgment) is generally considered to be an adaptive way of responding to emotional experience. Anxiety sensitivity can be conceptualized as a maladaptive response (fear) to arousal-related somatic sensations commonly associated with anxiety. Emotion regulation strategies a...

The slasher film is a subgenre of horror characterized by suspenseful scenes emphasizing victims’ fear of an antagonist and depicting graphic violence. A well-recognized characteristic of the slasher formula is the potential for viewers to quickly predict the fate of each character. Slasher films are thought to include a character known as the Fina...

Previous research on BDSM (bondage-discipline, domination-submission, sadomasochism) tends to treat practitioners as a homogenous group and lumps dominants (desire to take control) and submissives (desire to be controlled) together. Research suggests that personality traits, such as extraversion, relate to a variety of sexual attitudes and behaviou...

Participants (124 heterosexual women) completed measures of thin-ideal internalization, discrepancy between perceptions of actual and ideal figure (DISCSELF), perceptions of the discrepancy between estimates of partner's view of actual and ideal female figure (DISCPART), body image, and sexual well-being. We found support for the proposed perceptio...

We examined factors associated with parents’ reports of three aspects of parent-child sexual communication, quality, frequency with which parents encouraged questions, and extent of communication, on each of 10 sexual health topics. Participants were 3,413 mothers and 426 fathers with children in kindergarten to grade 8. Parents’ demographic charac...

Problems related to negative body image are very common among young women. In this study, we examined the relationship between women's body image and their sexual functioning over and above the effects of physical exercise and body mass index (BMI) in a sample of 214 university women. Low situational body image dysphoria and low body dissatisfactio...

We surveyed 336 teachers in elementary and middle schools in New Brunswick to assess their attitudes towards sexual health education (SHE), the importance they assign to sexual health topics, their knowledge about and comfort teaching these topics, and the grade at which they think these topics should be introduced. Ninety-three percent of teachers...

Attitudes toward and experiences with sexual health education (SHE) at school and at home were assessed in a sample of 745 middle school students enrolled in grades 6-8 in New Brunswick. Students were in favour of SHE at school (93%), and the majority (69%) agreed that schools and parents should share this responsibility. Almost all students though...

This study examined the attitudes and experiences of New Brunswick parents regarding sexual health education (SHE) at school and at home. Over 4200 parents with children in grades K-8 in 30 New Brunswick schools completed surveys. Ninety-four percent of parents agreed that SHE should be provided in school and 95% felt that it should be a shared res...