Facing a traumatic event, such as being diagnosed with HIV, the individual tries to find an explanation why the traumatic event happened. One way to answer that question is through attributions. The purpose of this study was to examine subjective attribution theories for HIV (internal/self-blame, external/blaming others, and fatalistic) and their association with coping styles and psychological functioning among 57 self-defined gay men who were HIV-positive. None of the respondents were diagnosed with AIDS. Although all men made attributions for their HIV infection, few had incorporated exclusively self-blame and external attributions, respectively. About one-third of the gay men attributed HIV to both self-blame and external factors. Self-blame attribution was associated with the avoidant coping style. Analyses yielded that both self-blame attribution and the avoidant coping style correlated with depressive mood and life dissatisfaction. External attribution theory displayed a positive relation to depressive mood. No particular HIV attribution theory was tied to good psychological functioning. The clinical implications of these results are discussed.

Most concepts of sexual desire implicitly refer to early phases of attraction and youthful living systems. For an alternative conceptual approach of decreasing sexual desire in long-term relationships, three points are addressed which influence the definition and theorizing on decreasing sexual interest: (1) passive vs. active negation of desire; (2) desire as part of sexual function vs. desire as passion in its own right; and (3) desire as individual trait vs. emergent function of structural coupling of the partners.

In 1966, at the start of the student movement and the sexual liberalization process, we studied the sexual behavior and attitudes of 3,666 male and female students from 12 West German universities by mailed questionnaires. In 1981 we replicated this study with 1,922 students from 13 universities (10 the same as 1966, 3 founded after 1966). In both studies the students were selected at random. Results of these comparative studies are presented with a view to the changes in sex differences. Sex differences in masturbation behavior have considerably decreased since 1966; masturbation is nonetheless still the form of sexual behavior with the most striking differences between the sexes. The sex differences in coital behavior are now reversed, female students being earlier and more active than males. As regards the tendency to change partners or for sexual relations outside a steady relationship, the differences between men and women have disappeared. In their attitudes to sexuality, female students in 1981 are somewhat more liberal than their male counterparts, whereas hardly any difference could be found in 1966. These changes in sex differences are observed in all subsamples, i.e., in young and old, in strictly religious and nonreligious students, and in students from both upper- and lower-class backgrounds (educational level of parents).

This study explores determinants of unsafe sex, specifically in HIV‐infected gay men. It is assumed that safe sex in HIV‐positive men is determined by other factors than in men with an unknown or negative serostatus. For HIV‐positive men it is much less an issue of protecting oneself, and more so an issue of protecting the other. It is hypothesized that for HIV‐positive men, practising safe and unsafe sex is the outcome of a coping process, in which the stress of being infected is mediated by several factors, potentially resulting in a tendency to compulsive sexual behaviour (sexualization). A path analytic test supports the theoretical model. However, sexualization, especially the tendency to have sex to make oneself feel better, is only related to the number of sex partners one has had and not to having practised unsafe sex. This may imply that practising safe and unsafe sex should be much more understood from an interpersonal than an intrapersonal perspective.

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