Hey, I don't write the tests, I just take them!!
Rosie, your sexual turn on is:

When you get turned on, it's purely physiological — you simply can't help it. It's involuntary and seems to happen out of nowhere, but rest assured, it's definitely not random. There are reasons you react the way you do around certain people and this report will help you understand the who, what and why behind that.

Relative to other people, your test scores indicate that you're turned on primarily by a man's personality. This doesn't mean his looks or other attributes aren't important — they most definitely are. But chances are that unless he has a rich inner life, you won't feel that initial spark of desire.

This is because what you want most of all is a deep psychological connection.

Being personality-driven has a certain vulnerability attached to it since it forces you to share a part of yourself as well. It also implies that you value meaningful connections requiring some emotional investment — you simply aren't satisfied with light and surface relationships.

This attraction has some major advantages. Being turned on by traits you value and want in a person will not only reel you in for the short term, but it can set you up for the long term. You appreciate those characteristics that actually improve as time goes on.

A Closer Look at Personality
So, now you know you're turned on by personality. But what is it exactly about their personality that lures you in?

Of course, there are many, many aspects of personality and the aim of this test was not to assess them all. Instead, we focused on characteristics that are most commonly associated with attractiveness, fertility, health, and sex drive. Specifically, we honed in on two categories of personality characteristics: Interpersonal Skills and Social Influence.

Interpersonal Skills refers to what it's like to interact with the person you are interested in on a personal level.

Social Influence refers to how powerful, established, and successful this person is in the world.

Here's how you scored:

Your score indicates that you are more attracted to a man's social influence than his interpersonal skills. What exactly do we mean by social influence? Well, their perceived wealth, success and intelligence — characteristics that indicate the level of influence or power a man has on the world and his surroundings. Of course, no one knows for sure what success or wealth someone truly possesses until they know them quite well. This is why we say "perceived." The initial turn on is usually based on what you think someone does or does not have.

Comparatively, you ascribe less importance to a man who is more skilled dealing on an intimate, one-on-one level with another person. That's not to say you don't care about these characteristics — it's just that they simply don't spark an attraction the way his place in the world might. This implies that you are attracted to someone with direction and ambition — someone who knows what they want out of life. If a man shows no interest in these things, he tends to have less of a pull on you.

We've already taken an in-depth look at the factor that turns you on most, personality. Now we will look at the remaining two — physical appearance and environment — to see how they play a part in pushing your buttons.

Physical Appearance

Comparing Face to Body
What exactly is it about a man's appearance that you find attractive? The way he looks in jeans? His jaw line? In order to get more specific, Emode measured your responses to certain test questions about facial characteristics and body shape. Below is a graph depicting the relative importance of the face versus the body when it comes to what turns you on:

In other words, Rosie, when it comes to physical appearance, you're more attracted to faces than other tantalizing body lures. This implies that you need more of a personal connection with the object of your attraction. While the body isn't unimportant to you by any means, you appear to ascribe it less significance in general. Perhaps you believe that since the body is constantly in flux — it changes with exercise, age, diet, etc. — it's futile to get so attached to a particular size or shape. In contrast, a person's face tends to remain the same over time. Besides, it's a person's essence. It holds their expressions, their emotions, their smile. And that must be important to you whether you're aware of it or not.

Environmental Factors

There are countless details that can change how an environment affects you. Ever noticed how good-looking a friend is when you see him in candlelight the first time? Or how attractive that guy in Accounting suddenly seems when he starts strumming a guitar?

Whether it's the location you're in, the music you're listening to, your mood or the weather, the situation you're in with a man can affect how you feel about him. For some people, the environment has to be "just so" before they can open up to sexual vibes.

To determine what kind of environment it is, that influences your attraction, we looked at whether you are more sensitive to internal or external environmental factors.

Internal factors are things like mood or music.

External factors are things like the physical environment, lighting, or the way things look.

Here's how you scored:

Your score indicates that, relatively speaking, internal factors have a greater impact on how turned on you get than do external factors. What exactly are internal factors? Well, they're subtle and often hard to grasp. They are variables like health or the effect of music — things that affect everyone differently.

Think for a minute about these questions: How much of an impact does your frame of mind have on your sex drive? Is your mood intimately linked with your ability to feel attraction? Does your libido plunge when you have a cold? Have you ever had the experience when you're listening to the right song that suddenly everyone around you seems beautiful? Does alcohol get you especially turned on or mushy?

Chances are that since you scored high on the internal side of things, you are more sensitive to these things. Remember that there is no "correct" way of responding to internal factors. You may want to just keep this in mind so that the next time you're feeling attraction, you can double check that it is in fact the person who is tickling your fancy and not just the context. And conversely, if your attraction to someone is waning, it could be your health or mood that's taken a nosedive, not your interest.

Your emotional investment can be measured by two factors, intensity and variety.

Intensity measures how much you let someone who turns you on get to you. How deep are your feelings towards people? Do you get swept away thinking about the object of your desire? The extreme end of this spectrum is obsession — people who actually lose sight of anything but the person they've fixated on. But for the most part, by "intensity," we're simply referring to how emotionally invested you tend to get with each and every crush.

Variety measures how many people — and how many types of people — you allow get to you. Do you find yourself attracted to people left and right? Are all kinds of people turning your head or are you more selective? Do you see your romantic potentials swimming in a huge sea or a small pond?

Based on what you told Emode in your test, here's how you scored:

Your attractions are more intense than they are broad. This means that you tend to become fixated on the objects of your desire. So much so, in fact, that you risk losing all sensibility. This is something you might want to keep on top of since exerting such intensity may be actually be uncomfortable to the people you find attractive. The point is to enjoy the ride but to avoid driving so fast that you spin out of control and lose all sense of orientation.

A Closer Look at Your Intensity Score

You tend to be mildly focused on a man who turns you on. In fact, you probably think about him often and grow attached to the idea of being with him.

People who score extremely high on the intensity scale may experience a recurrent feeling that they're in love — that someone they're attracted to is their soul mate. Maybe they're already thinking about the wedding and the house they're going to own together before they've even spoken to this person! People who score low on this scale don't put much emotional investment into their attractions. Perhaps they need to know someone better before emotions get involved or maybe they prefer only light attachments.

A Closer Look at Your Variety Score

You've got a relatively wide scope when it comes to the kinds of people you're attracted to.

People who score high on the variety scale are interested in people of many different races, possibly both genders or a large range of ages. People who score lower on this scale tend to be more selective and are sexually responsive to only certain types of people. By understanding these extremes, you may be more able to assess where you lie in between them.

If this is a trend you notice appearing when things are rough, it could be a good litmus test for when you're having difficulties in your life. That way, you can keep tabs on whether or not you're trying to make up for a bad feeling by whitewashing it with a passing desire that comes with attraction to others. The bad feelings don't go away with the presence of sexual attraction; they simply get submerged and later rise up again to make you deal with the same issues.

The drawback of this cycle is not only that you could wind up fighting a repetitive, losing battle, but also that it could lead you to make relationship decisions at the height of your attraction surge. Then later, you may be stuck wondering what you were thinking — feeling regret and confusion that you were attracted to someone who now barely captures your attention.

However, it could be that you are certain that confusion is not driving your need for diversity. Perhaps the low and high points of your attraction aren't terribly far apart — you are consistent in your interests over time. If this is the case, then embrace that glorious feeling and enjoy the moments you feel it, appreciating and encouraging yourself all the while.

You're not alone in the world. Take a look at how other test takers answered questions about what turns them on — hopefully, they'll give you a sense that other people get turned on by similar things you do.

I can't give the answers..... that wouldn't be fair!! (go to eMde and take the test!)

A few of the questions are:
I can't enjoy sex with someone who isn't my intellectual equal.
Just seeing satin sheets can make me think about sex.
Emotional sensitivity is important in a sexual partner.
My libido is shot when I'm feeling under the weather.
Penis size: does it matter?
What makes a man most kissable?
It's hard to have good sex with someone who doesn't know how to listen.
I am more attracted to someone if they do something thoughtful for me.
Music gets me in the mood for sex.
Alcohol affects my sex drive.

How we experience attraction
Some theories say that getting turned on is the result of an entire predictable system of physiological and emotional reactions being ignited at once. There is much evidence to support this.

Most of us basically experience some sort of change in consciousness when we are attracted to someone. Rationale, it seems, goes straight out the window. From an evolutionary perspective, this is actually a good thing. In fact, were we to sit back and analyze whether we really want to be sexual with someone we're attracted to, we might just never do it. Logic, it turns out, kills the mood.

Antonio Damasio at the University of Iowa found that when the connection between the "limbic brain" and "higher brain" was severed in people, it "brought commitment phobia to a whole new level" (Rogers, 2001). In other words, part of the reason we're able to attach and commit to one another is an irrationality induced by the chemistry of our brain. When we are infatuated, we utilize more of our body's natural amphetamines than what we normally do. In other words, it's actually natural for us to lose ourselves in the madness of lust.

We react to a person's physique as well as a variety of personality and environmental factors. The physique is the most universal of these effects, and there are many reasons why this might be the case. For one, the physical attributes we find most attractive are associated with greater health and fertility. They are also associated with lower levels of disease.

Of course, all this makes sense in terms of propagation of the species — but that's not exactly what's going through your mind when someone catches your eye, is it? Attraction and your sexual reaction to someone are nearly instantaneous. You can rationalize it all you want, but in the end it is just what it is: physiological.

Attraction typically manifests itself in a multitude of physical ways: "exhilaration, euphoria, buoyancy, sleeplessness, loss of appetite, shyness, awkwardness, trembling, flushing, stammering, butterflies in the stomach, sweating palms, weak knees, dilated pupils, dizziness, a pounding heart, and accelerated breathing." (Rogers, 2001). Note that according to the American Psychiatric Association (1994), a "panic attack" often manifests as a "pounding heart, sweating, trembling or shaking, sensations of shortness of breath, feeling of choking, chest pain or discomfort, nausea or abdominal distress, feeling dizzy, unsteady, lightheaded or faint, feelings of unreality, fear of losing control or going crazy, fear of dying, numbness or tingling sensations, chills or hot flashes." Sound familiar?

Generally, what both men and women tend to find attractive are other people who have similar characteristics to their own. In other words, people who mate sexually are roughly equal in their attractiveness. Cindy Crawford might have been the ideal woman for the vast majority of men at one point in recent history, but how many of those men actually married her and gave her children? Not many. The rest of them, for the most part, ended up with women with roughly the same level of attractiveness of their own.

Because we are likely to find one another attractive to certain degrees either way, this helps us stay open to variety and helps us to be happy mating with people who don't exactly fit our ideal. So while you now have a better sense of what your ideal is, you aren't bound to it like you are to your eye color or height. Instead, it is something you can recognize and that can guide you, but ultimately you are free to make decisions about who you want to be sexual with based on varying factors in your own life and according to your own feelings and preferences.

The more you understand about what you want in an ideal sexual partner, the more complete your sex life and relationships will be in general. While this test is the first step towards a more fulfilling future, we don't want it to end there.

To give you even deeper insight about what you need in a sexual relationship and how to find it, we're going to send you four follow-up emails — one per week for the next four weeks.

During this time we will take a closer look at your test answers so we can tailor more advice to your particular personality. We'll help you take your Ideal Sex Partner test one step further with advice on what your ideal sex partner's views on monogamy and foreplay are. You'll learn what they like to do after sex and — most importantly — how to turn your current sex partner into your ideal.

Look for your first mailing in one week!

In the process of formulating this test, Emode created many scales to derive the balance scores. These are created by first looking at how everyone rated aspects of one of the two things that are being balanced (e.g., social influence), and then did the same again for the other of the two things (e.g., interpersonal skill). So in the example of personality characteristics with social influence and interpersonal skill, by comparing how everyone rates the two things, we give scores that show the relative importance you gave to social influence, compared with everyone else, and then again the relative importance you gave to interpersonal skill, compared with what everyone else gave it. So in saying that your social influence score is higher than your interpersonal skill score is, for example, we are communicating that when compared with others, you value interpersonal skill more than you value social influence — the average overall is an equal balance of the two. This example illustrates the general process by which the balance scores were determined.

Determining the attraction force was done with a different method. The attraction forces of physical, personality and contextual factors were simultaneously investigated in order to determine the relatively importance each person attributed to each. By comparing the relative importance of these three things, we could tell, for each person, whether there was any one or two of the three that stood out as being much higher than the other one or two. We looked for large differences in importance you attributed to each of them. For those who had no large differences, their forces are even, balanced, and that is reflected in the forces described in that part of the report.

American Psychiatric Association. (1994). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, fourth edition. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association.

Etcoff, Nancy (1999). Survival of the Prettiest. Anchor Books, New York, New York.

Rodgers, Joann Ellison (2001). Sex: A Natural History. Henry Holt and Company, LLC, New York New York.