Credit: Wikipedia
Previous research explored these mechanisms either by simply asking people about their sexuality, or by using physiological measures such as assessing their genital arousal. These methods, however, come with substantial problems.
“We wanted to find an alternative measure that would be an automatic indication of sexual orientation, but without being as invasive as previous measures. Pupillary responses are exactly that,” says Gerulf Rieger, lead author and research fellow at Cornell. “With this new technology we are able to explore sexual orientation of people who would never participate in a study on genital arousal, such as people from traditional cultures. This will give us a much better understanding how sexuality is expressed across the planet.”
The new Cornell study adds considerably more to the field of sexuality research than merely a novel measure. As expected, heterosexual men showed strong pupillary responses to sexual videos of women, and little to men; heterosexual women, however, showed pupillary responses to both sexes. This result confirms previous research suggesting that women have a very different type of sexuality than men.
Moreover, the new study feeds into a long-lasting debate on male bisexuality. Previous notions were that most bisexual men do not base their sexual identity on their physiological sexual arousal but on romantic and identity issues. Contrary to this claim, bisexual men in the new study showed substantial pupil dilations to sexual videos of both men and women.
“We can now finally argue that a flexible sexual desire is not simply restricted to women – some men have it, too, and it is reflected in their pupils,” says Ritch C. Savin-Williams, co-author and professor in Human Development at Cornell. “In fact, not even a division into ‘straight,’ ‘bi,’ and ‘gay’ tells the full story. Men who identity as ‘mostly straight’ really exist both in their identity and their pupil response; they are more aroused to males than straight men, but much less so than both bisexual and gay men,” Savin-Williams notes.
The researchers are confident that their new measure will aid in understanding these groups better and point to a range of sexualities that has been ignored in previous research.
Personal and interpersonal factors other than sexual attraction may affect pupil dilation to stimuli of the same sex or other sex. For example, participants may dilate in response to comparing themselves, on a physical or social level, more with stimuli of their own sex than with the other sex (e.g., by asking whether they are better looking than the stimulus). Similarly, perceived personality characteristics of men and women used for stimuli could affect pupillary responses. Future research should assess how such effects compare, in magnitude, to the effects of sexual orientation on pupillary response.
Findings from the present study suggest, for the first time across a large sample, that pupil dilation patterns are significant indicators of sexual orientation. As opposed to previous measures of sexuality, the possible benefits of pupil dilation include a similarity of assessment across the sexes, its potential to reach a wide range of participants, and its ability to capture automatic responses. The assessment of pupil dilation can therefore complement other physiological and self-report measures of sexual orientation.The findings were published August 3 in the scientific journal PLoS ONE (http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0040256).
swipe in yo but reveals sexual orientation