Adolescents' Sexual Scripts: Schematic Representations of Consensual and Nonconsensual Heterosexual Interactions (Report‪)‬

In social cognition research, cognitive scripts are characterized as schematic knowledge structures about "appropriate sequences of events in a particular context" (Schank & Abelson, 1977, p. 41). Scripts facilitate the understanding of social situations; direct the selection, processing, and retrieval of social information; and serve as guidelines for behavior. They also contain normative expectations about the behavior of others and the outcome of the situation. The concept of cognitive scripts has been applied to a wide range of social situations and behaviors, including sexual interactions. Sexual scripts are conceptualized as cognitive representations of prototypical sequences of events in sexual interactions (Metts & Spitzberg, 1996; Simon & Gagnon, 1986). They contain an individual's generalized knowledge, abstracted from direct or vicarious experience with specific sexual encounters, about the typical elements and events of a sexual interaction, including expectations about the behaviors of the partner and normative beliefs about the appropriateness of specific sexual behaviors. Sexual scripts are embedded in cultural norms about sexuality and reflect consensually shared gender stereotypes and gender-typed behavioral expectations. For example, Rosenthal and Smith (1997) showed that adolescents' sexual scripts contain views about what sexual behaviors are appropriate at a particular age. They identified a high consensus between boys and girls about "sexual timetables," that is, their perceptions about the age from which certain sexual behaviors, such as kissing, sexual touch, and sexual intercourse, are acceptable and appropriate. The present study explored adolescents' sexual scripts for the first sexual intercourse with a new partner in a heterosexual interaction: What do they perceive as characteristic features of a first sexual intercourse with a new partner in terms of the precursors of the interaction, the context of the sexual encounter itself, its evaluation, and the perspectives for the future relationship with the partner? The study differentiated between general scripts, reflecting adolescents' perceptions of the characteristic sequence of events in a heterosexual encounter as pertaining to their age group as a whole, and individual scripts, reflecting their schematic representations of sexual encounters as pertaining to themselves individually. Furthermore, rape scripts, that is, cognitive representations of nonconsensual sexual interactions between a man and a woman, were included in the analysis.