A new study published in the journal PLOS One reveals that a person’s underlying personality traits are strongly related to how often they experience sexual fantasies. The findings suggest that people with high levels of negative affectivity fantasize more often, whereas people who are highly agreeable or conscientious tend to have fewer sexual fantasies.
When psychologists try to understand why people behave the way they do, they often look to the Big 5 personality framework. This theoretical model asserts that human personality can be primarily described using five broad dimensions. Extraversion describes a person’s sociability and sociability, while agreeableness reflects interpersonal warmth and a desire for social harmony.
Integrity is associated with self-discipline and goal-directed behavior. Negative affectivity, often referred to as neuroticism, refers to the tendency to experience negative moods. Finally, open-mindedness includes an individual’s intellectual curiosity and willingness to accept new experiences.
To achieve even greater precision, psychologists divide each of these five broad traits into three smaller components known as facets. For example, integrity consists of organization, productivity, and responsibility. Negative emotions include anxiety, emotional instability, and depression. Analyzing personality at this granular level helps identify the precise psychological mechanisms that drive human behavior.
Despite the fundamental universality of sexual fantasies, they remain understudied in the psychological literature. For decades, clinical frameworks have framed these psychological experiences as inherently problematic or explicitly linked them to antisocial behaviors such as aggression and sexual offending. Recent scientific approaches attempt to study sexual desire in a value-neutral manner, recognizing that most adults experience sexual desire and often derive happiness from it.
However, scientists have collected little data on how everyday mental images are connected to standard personality profiles. Most previous research has only examined the broad categories of the Big Five, masking the specific nuances that facet-level data reveals.
To address this gap, psychologists Emily Cannuto and William J. Chopik of Michigan State University, along with Amy C. Moores of Chapman University and the Kinsey Institute, designed a large-scale national study. They recruited 5,225 adult participants through an online voting panel.
Participants ranged in age from 18 to 94 years, with an average age of approximately 58 years. Slightly more than half of the respondents were male. Because this study was part of a larger project focused on intimate relationships, nearly all participants were either married or actively dating someone. They were also relatively sexually active, with more than two-thirds saying they had sex at least once a month.
Participants first completed a standardized 30-item personality test. They read statements like, “I’m a person who worries a lot,” or “I’m a person who is persistent and works until the job is done.” They then rated how accurately each statement described their temperament on a 5-point scale. This allowed the research team to generate scores for both the overarching Big Five traits and their 15 specific dimensions.
Next, respondents completed a comprehensive sexual fantasy questionnaire. The tool presented 40 different sexual themes and asked participants to report how often they fantasized about each theme. Response options ranged from never having such a fantasy to experiencing it every day.
The researchers categorized the 40 themes into four main groups. Exploratory fantasies involve novel or group experiences, such as attending an orgy. Intimate fantasies center around emotional intimacy and romance, such as making love outdoors in a secluded and beautiful setting.
Impersonal fantasies feature scenarios in which participants act as observers, such as watching someone else have sex. Sadomasochistic fantasies include themes of submission, domination, or being forced to do something.
When analyzing the data, the researchers first simply compared personality scores and daydreaming frequency. They then applied statistical methods to isolate the unique effects of each trait. Because people’s personality traits often overlap, and age and gender influence sexual behavior, we held the overlapping variables constant in this secondary analysis.
They found that conscience is the most consistent predictor of a person’s sexual and mental life. Those who scored higher on conscientiousness reported lower frequency of all four types of sexual fantasies. Agreeableness showed a very similar pattern and reliably predicted lower frequency of daydreaming.
If we take a closer look at the aspects, it becomes clear exactly why these characteristics suppress sexual imagination. The negative association with cheerful people is driven entirely by the respect dimension and shows no substantial association with the compassion or trust dimensions. Similarly, for conscientious individuals, the responsibility dimension minimizes fantasies, while organization and productivity play no role.
People with a high sense of respect and responsibility may feel strong internal pressure to conform to traditional social norms. They may moralize their own behavior and naturally avoid entertaining themes of unconventional scenarios and consensual aggression.
Conversely, participants with higher levels of negative affect daydreamed more frequently. This positive association emerged similarly consistently across exploratory, intimate, impersonal, and sadomasochistic categories.
This finding became even clearer when the research team looked at the subcomponents of negative emotions. The dimensions of emotional instability and anxiety showed virtually no relationship with sexual fantasies. The overall effect was generated by the depression facet.
Researchers suspect this may indicate an emotion regulation strategy. People with depressive personality traits may intentionally or voluntarily resort to sexual fantasies to create a positive mental state. In this perspective, pleasant, stimulating or exciting thoughts act as a psychological buffer against low mood.
Some results contradicted previous psychological hypotheses. Previous research suggests that open-minded people are more likely to fantasize in general and would be expected to report more sexual fantasies. However, in this study, open-mindedness and its creative imagination dimension were largely unrelated to the frequency of sexual thoughts. Extraversion and its sociability, energy, and assertiveness dimensions also showed minimal relationships with daydreaming once age, gender, and other background variables were controlled.
The authors outlined several structural limitations to the study. Data relied natively on self-report surveys. When asked questions about sensitive topics, people may tailor their answers to appear socially common sense. Although the anonymous survey setting likely mitigated this bias to some extent, self-reporting cannot completely eliminate bias.
This study also relies on a cross-sectional design that captures people at a single point in time. This method does not allow you to track stability or change. A person’s personality traits and sexual interests can fluctuate over the years in response to changes in life circumstances.
Additionally, participants were heavily skewed white, and nearly all respondents were in a monogamous relationship. Future research should recruit more diverse samples, such as single people and people practicing consensual non-monogamy, to see if these patterns hold across different populations.
Understanding the natural variations in sexual imagination provides a useful framework for both researchers and clinicians. Expanding the focus beyond broad personality traits to specific aspects provides a higher resolution map of human sexuality. Normalizing these differences allows mental health professionals to approach conversations about sex in a deeper context, recognizing that the erotic life of the mind is intimately intertwined with a person’s basic psychological makeup.
The study, “Links Between the Big Five Personality Traits, Dimensions, and Sexual Fantasies,” was authored by Emily Canuto, Amy C. Moores, and William J. Chopik.
