Celeste Bittoni

• Master of Research
• PhD Student at University of Padua

Introduction Research has shown that hormonal contraceptive (HC) use is associated with risk for vulvar pain [1] and vulvodynia [2,3]. Although some literature has focused on combined hormonal contraceptives (CHCs), Bouchard et al [2] found that risk was higher for those using high progestin potency HCs. In addition to increased risk associated wit...

Introduction Persistent genital pain represents a significant health issue among females, with prevalence ranging from 18.5% for lower genital tract discomfort [2], 20% for chronic dyspareunia [3], and 8.3%-27.9% for vulvodynia [6, 7]. Latent class analyses (LCA) allow the identification of groups of individuals who share common symptom profiles an...

Introduction Affective neuroscience is the study of the brain substrates of emotional, embodied experiences. Affective neuroscience theory (ANT) is based on experimental evidence that all mammals are hardwired with 7 primary subcortical emotional operating systems, or “core emotions,” that have overlapping but distinct circuits buried in the deep,...

Introduction: More than 2 decades of neuroimaging research has sought to uncover the neurologic basis of sexual desire. However, the lack of a clear conceptual distinction between sexual desire and sexual arousal or even a broadly accepted definition of sexual desire has led to confusion in the literature regarding brain areas uniquely associated...

Introduction While researchers and clinicians have long discussed sexual desire and sexual arousal as two distinct entities, the DSM has moved from treating them separately (DSM-IV) to amalgamating desire and arousal disorders into one single diagnosis (“Female Sexual Interest/Arousal Disorder”; DSM-5). Consistent with the idea of combining them, t...

Introduction To evaluate the presence of negative thoughts and how these interfere with sexual functioning (as hypothesized by Barlow, 1986), Nobre and Pinto-Gouveia (2003) developed the Automatic Negative Thoughts scale (ANT). Research using this scale has shown that negative thoughts during sex interferes with subjective sexual arousal (SSA), lub...

Introduction Past research on Persistent Genital Arousal Disorder (PGAD) has shown that a history of sexual abuse is common among women with PGAD (Leiblum et al., 2007; Pink et al., 2014), with higher rates of abuse among those who are most symptomatic (Leiblum et al., 2007). However, there is a need for replication and for developing a theoretical...

Background Past research on the association between sexual desire and the menstrual cycle has provided inconclusive results and has not considered the potential influence of psychological and physical changes that are frequently associated with the menstrual cycle. Aim To test the strength of association between the menstrual cycle (and associated...

The aim of the present study was to expand previous findings regarding paradoxical effects of negative mood on sexual desire. This was done by considering the full range of depressed mood and anxiety symptoms and using methods that are unaffected by recall bias and that don’t require participants to infer causal associations between their mood and...

Introduction Previous studies aimed at defining the relationship between high levels of negative mood and sexual desire have shown that, in addition to people describing an expected decrease in sexual desire, some people report an unexpected increase in sexual desire when depressed or anxious (referred to as a “paradoxical effect”, Bancroft et al.,...

Introduction Although research has attempted to quantify the effects of the menstrual cycle on sexual desire, we lack a clear understanding of how the menstrual cycle, and the many physical and psychological changes of the menstrual cycle, are related to changes in sexual desire. For example, whereas evolutionary theories predict that women should...