There is also the interesting question (which the researchers don’t address) about what’s in an image. I’m always amazed that research like this fails to account for the meaning of an image, as if one image of a naked man or woman is the same as any other. As if the physical pose, the colors, the body type, the hair style, the background, don’t have an impact. It’s true that these images were selected from a tool that is used and has been validated, but a visual tool that was validated five years ago may not be as valid today. And without understanding something of the meaning of sexual imagery for the participants it’s hard to make any meaning of these results.
For example, what if all the male participants were strongly religious, and are triggered in a different way by nudity than all the female participants. Individual responses to sexual stimuli are incredibly complicated, and none of this is accounted for by the authors of this study.
Finally, and not of least importance, we have to remember that this is correlational research and as such research like this could never result in a conclusion that attention type A means your gay, or straight, or bisexual, or you like clowns.
In fact their findings in no way offer any sort of orientation test, and I would argue that what their findings show more than anything is that there is huge individual difference in the way we respond to erotic images. This seems to be evidence that such a test would simply never work.
Beyond this particular study, the concept of a test to determine sexual orientation is anywhere between reductive and ludicrous. Neither the medical science nor the social science community has come anywhere near producing a body of work that could concretely define something like sexual orientation. Research for the “gay gene” is equally problematic, and of course still hasn’t yielded a single identifiable gene that holds markers for sexual orientation.
While this study wasn’t really “about” sexual orientation I think it does a good job of pointing out how little we continue to know about orientation. The fact that these researchers (and others) rely on the Kinsey scale, a methodology that is over fifty years old, I think highlights how little insight we’ve gained into sexual orientation since the 50s.
Source:
Jiang, Y., Costello, P., Fang, F., Hunag, M., & He, S. “A Gender and Sexual Orientation-Dependent Spatial Attentional Effect of Invisible Images.” PNAS Early Edition (October 23, 2006). Accessed October 23, 2006.
