Spectatoring

You are in the middle of something and a second voice starts up. How is this going. Do I look like this from there. Is it taking too long. And the moment you hear that voice, the thing you were inside of has moved a little further away, and now you are watching it happen to you.

It has a name, and the name is nearly sixty years old.

Where the word comes from

Masters and Johnson called it spectatoring: stepping out of an experience in order to observe your own performance in it. They described it in couples who had come to them for help, and the description was so exact that it left the consulting room and became an ordinary English word for something everyone recognises.¹

Recognisability is a warning sign, though. Plenty of vivid clinical descriptions turned out to describe something real that behaves nothing like the theory built on top of it. So: what has actually been measured?

The model

The most durable account came in 1986. Reviewing his own laboratory work, David Barlow set out a handful of reliable differences between people who were responding easily and people who were not: what they felt during arousal, how accurately they judged their own arousal, how much control they reported having over it, how distractible they were, and how they responded when made apprehensive.²

His proposal was that the mechanism is cognitive interference. Attention is finite; when it is spent on monitoring performance, there is less of it available for the experience that produces the response. Apprehension does not act directly — it acts by capturing attention.

That is a good theory. It is testable, which is more than most theories in this territory manage. And when people tested it, the results got interestingly untidy.

What happens when self-focus is induced

In 2006 an experiment did the obvious thing: it made people watch themselves. Sixteen women who reported no difficulties and sixteen who did viewed erotic film in two counterbalanced sessions, one of them in front of a half-silvered screen that reflected them back at themselves. Genital response was measured directly alongside what participants reported.³

Self-focus lowered the physiological response — in the women who were not reporting difficulties. It did not do so in the women who were. And in both groups it sharply reduced the agreement between what the body was doing and what the person said was happening.

Read that twice, because it is the opposite of the folk story. The folk story says self-watching is what afflicts people who are struggling. The experiment found the induced version knocking the response of people who were fine, while the group who supposedly live there were unmoved by a bit more of it. There are honest readings — perhaps a group already high in self-focus has little room to add more — but the tidy narrative does not survive.

Distraction is not the same lever

If attention is the mechanism, then loading it with anything ought to work. That was tested the same year: twenty women reporting difficulties and twenty-one not, given steadily increasing neutral distraction while both physiological and subjective responses were tracked.⁴

Subjective arousal rated in the moment was not affected by increasing distraction, in either group. Arousal rated afterwards was. The distraction changed the account more than the event.

That is a genuinely strange result and it complicates the simple model. Neutral distraction and self-directed attention are apparently not interchangeable, and part of what spectatoring damages may be the record rather than the experience — which would explain why the feeling afterwards is so often of something having been spoiled that seemed alright at the time.

Where the popular version overreaches

The most common use of the idea outside the literature is to explain the link between how people feel about their bodies and what they do about closeness. Self-focus, the story goes, is the mechanism.

It was checked. A 1997 study replicated the body-image link, then tested whether self-focus carried it. Mostly it did not. What carried it looked more like self-valence — how someone appraises what they notice, and the avoidance that follows — than the act of noticing.⁵

Attention is part of this. It is not the whole of it, and the piece being left out is the part with feelings in it.

Out of the lab

The field evidence is consistent, if modest. Seventy-four young women reported how much they were mentally elsewhere during intimacy with a partner. Those reporting more of it also reported lower confidence in themselves, less satisfaction and less consistent physical response — associations that held after mood, desire, general self-focus, sexual attitudes and body dissatisfaction were accounted for.⁶

That is a questionnaire study, so it establishes company, not cause. Being distracted during closeness and being dissatisfied with it are the kind of pair that could run in either direction, or both.

Why this is a Promising and not a Solid

We expected to grade this one higher, and the evidence would not carry it. The description is excellent and the direction of the effect is supported. But the samples are small — sixteen and sixteen, twenty and twenty-one, seventy-four — almost entirely women, almost entirely in laboratories, using measures that agree with each other poorly. The most direct experiment found the effect in the group that the theory says should be least affected. A second found the moment untouched and only the memory altered. There is a real phenomenon here. There is not yet a settled mechanism.

One thing worth sitting with

Notice what this rules out. The standard advice for the situation is just relax, or stop overthinking it — both of which are instructions to monitor whether you are relaxed and to think about not thinking. On any attention-based account, that is the failure repeated in a firmer voice. You cannot fix a self-monitoring problem with more self-monitoring, and it is worth knowing that the most-given advice is built the wrong way round.

You didn’t lose the mood. You changed what you were paying attention to — and attention won’t hold two things at once. Which is why “just relax” makes it worse: it is one more thing to check.

What this might mean for an ordinary evening

1. Give attention somewhere to go. The one thing every version of this literature agrees on is that attention is finite. Texture, weight, warmth, breath, sound — something with sensory detail in it, that is not you.
2. Slow down before you try harder. Speed leaves gaps, and gaps get filled with commentary.
3. Drop the grading. An evening with a mark out of ten attached will be attended to as an exam. This is the part you can actually change.
4. Expect it to visit anyway. Noticing the commentary and returning is the whole move. Being annoyed that it turned up is another round of commentary.

None of the above is treatment. If this is persistent and it is causing you distress, that is a conversation for a GP or a qualified therapist, who have considerably better tools than an essay. Our closeness work is company for an unhurried hour, and nothing more than that.

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