Today's "Science confirms what we already know": Homophobia!

[Sriad]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 234458.htm

Is Some Homophobia Self-Phobia?

ScienceDaily (Apr. 6, 2012) — Homophobia is more pronounced in individuals with an unacknowledged attraction to the same sex and who grew up with authoritarian parents who forbade such desires, a series of psychology studies demonstrates.

The study is the first to document the role that both parenting and sexual orientation play in the formation of intense and visceral fear of homosexuals, including self-reported homophobic attitudes, discriminatory bias, implicit hostility towards gays, and endorsement of anti-gay policies. Conducted by a team from the University of Rochester, the University of Essex, England, and the University of California in Santa Barbara, the research will be published the April issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

"Individuals who identify as straight but in psychological tests show a strong attraction to the same sex may be threatened by gays and lesbians because homosexuals remind them of similar tendencies within themselves," explains Netta Weinstein, a lecturer at the University of Essex and the study's lead author.

"In many cases these are people who are at war with themselves and they are turning this internal conflict outward," adds co-author Richard Ryan, professor of psychology at the University of Rochester who helped direct the research.

The paper includes four separate experiments, conducted in the United States and Germany, with each study involving an average of 160 college students. The findings provide new empirical evidence to support the psychoanalytic theory that the fear, anxiety, and aversion that some seemingly heterosexual people hold toward gays and lesbians can grow out of their own repressed same-sex desires, Ryan says. The results also support the more modern self-determination theory, developed by Ryan and Edward Deci at the University of Rochester, which links controlling parenting to poorer self-acceptance and difficulty valuing oneself unconditionally.

The findings may help to explain the personal dynamics behind some bullying and hate crimes directed at gays and lesbians, the authors argue. Media coverage of gay-related hate crimes suggests that attackers often perceive some level of threat from homosexuals. People in denial about their sexual orientation may lash out because gay targets threaten and bring this internal conflict to the forefront, the authors write.

The research also sheds light on high profile cases in which anti-gay public figures are caught engaging in same-sex sexual acts. The authors cite such examples as Ted Haggard, the evangelical preacher who opposed gay marriage but was exposed in a gay sex scandal in 2006, and Glenn Murphy, Jr., former chairman of the Young Republican National Federation and vocal opponent of gay marriage, who was accused of sexually assaulting a 22-year-old man in 2007, as potentially reflecting this dynamic.

"We laugh at or make fun of such blatant hypocrisy, but in a real way, these people may often themselves be victims of repression and experience exaggerated feelings of threat," says Ryan. "Homophobia is not a laughing matter. It can sometimes have tragic consequences," Ryan says, pointing to cases such as the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard or the 2011 shooting of Larry King.

To explore participants' explicit and implicit sexual attraction, the researchers measured the discrepancies between what people say about their sexual orientation and how they react during a split-second timed task. Students were shown words and pictures on a computer screen and asked to put these in "gay" or "straight" categories. Before each of the 50 trials, participants were subliminally primed with either the word "me" or "others" flashed on the screen for 35 milliseconds. They were then shown the words "gay," "straight," "homosexual," and "heterosexual" as well as pictures of straight and gay couples, and the computer tracked precisely their response times. A faster association of "me" with "gay" and a slower association of "me" with "straight" indicated an implicit gay orientation.

A second experiment, in which subjects were free to browse same-sex or opposite-sex photos, provided an additional measure of implicit sexual attraction.

Through a series of questionnaires, participants also reported on the type of parenting they experienced growing up, from authoritarian to democratic. Students were asked to agree or disagree with statements like: "I felt controlled and pressured in certain ways," and "I felt free to be who I am." For gauging the level of homophobia in a household, subjects responded to items like: "It would be upsetting for my mom to find out she was alone with a lesbian" or "My dad avoids gay men whenever possible."

Finally, the researcher measured participants' level of homophobia -- both overt, as expressed in questionnaires on social policy and beliefs, and implicit, as revealed in word-completion tasks. In the latter, students wrote down the first three words that came to mind, for example for the prompt "k i _ _." The study tracked the increase in the amount of aggressive words elicited after subliminally priming subjects with the word "gay" for 35 milliseconds.

Across all the studies, participants with supportive and accepting parents were more in touch with their implicit sexual orientation, while participants from authoritarian homes revealed the most discrepancy between explicit and implicit attraction.

"In a predominately heterosexual society, 'know thyself' can be a challenge for many gay individuals. But in controlling and homophobic homes, embracing a minority sexual orientation can be terrifying," explains Weinstein. These individuals risk losing the love and approval of their parents if they admit to same sex attractions, so many people deny or repress that part of themselves, she said.

In addition, participants who reported themselves to be more heterosexual than their performance on the reaction time task indicated were most likely to react with hostility to gay others, the studies showed. That incongruence between implicit and explicit measures of sexual orientation predicted a variety of homophobic behaviors, including self-reported anti-gay attitudes, implicit hostility towards gays, endorsement of anti-gay policies, and discriminatory bias such as the assignment of harsher punishments for homosexuals, the authors conclude.

"This study shows that if you are feeling that kind of visceral reaction to an out-group, ask yourself, 'Why?'" says Ryan. "Those intense emotions should serve as a call to self-reflection."

The study had several limitations, the authors write. All participants were college students, so it may be helpful in future research to test these effects in younger adolescents still living at home and in older adults who have had more time to establish lives independent of their parents and to look at attitudes as they change over time.

Other contributors to the paper include Cody DeHaan, Andrew Przybylski, and Nicole Legate, all from the University of Rochester, and William Ryan, from the University of California in Santa Barbara.

Commentary in title.

[Terralthra]

This article repeatedly refers to partial results. "The findings provide new empirical evidence to support the psychoanalytic theory that the fear, anxiety, and aversion that some seemingly heterosexual people hold toward gays and lesbians can grow out of their own repressed same-sex desires, Ryan says." The "some" and "many" continue throughout the piece, but the description of the results never clarifies how big this portion is.

[sciguy]

Did anyone else think that the methodology in this study sounded pretty fucked up? Have any of those methods actually been rigorously validated for measuring what they're supposed to measure?

[Sriad]

This article repeatedly refers to partial results. "The findings provide new empirical evidence to support the psychoanalytic theory that the fear, anxiety, and aversion that some seemingly heterosexual people hold toward gays and lesbians can grow out of their own repressed same-sex desires, Ryan says." The "some" and "many" continue throughout the piece, but the description of the results never clarifies how big this portion is.

The "somes" and "manys" are unfortunate, but this is more a preview study's findings; there'll be numbers in the full publication of the study in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology... Unless it's total bullshit study.

[Ziggy Stardust]

It's hard to know for sure, because this is just a pop-sci review of a study I have been unable to find online (anyone else have any luck?), but I am not convinced as to the veracity of this part:

To explore participants' explicit and implicit sexual attraction, the researchers measured the discrepancies between what people say about their sexual orientation and how they react during a split-second timed task. Students were shown words and pictures on a computer screen and asked to put these in "gay" or "straight" categories. Before each of the 50 trials, participants were subliminally primed with either the word "me" or "others" flashed on the screen for 35 milliseconds. They were then shown the words "gay," "straight," "homosexual," and "heterosexual" as well as pictures of straight and gay couples, and the computer tracked precisely their response times. A faster association of "me" with "gay" and a slower association of "me" with "straight" indicated an implicit gay orientation.

While I can't find THIS paper online, the same group of people published a study that was almost exactly similar in every way, except replacing sexual identity with religious identity. The methods of this are described here.

How many problems with this methodology can we find (I think we can safely assume the studies are pretty similar, because the religious identity one specifically cites the sexual identity one as being similar)?

Well ... the lack of any sort of control group is pretty damning. They don't seem to be comparing their results against anything, they got the data from their priming study (and log-transformed it, which is always a bit of a red flag, as it's a great way to "force" the data into conforming to a trend that may or may not exist) and claim it supports an obviously preconceived hypothesis. Also, it's not even designed the way a priming study is supposed to be set up, which should be more like this:

Category congruency
priming of this kind differs from so-called semantic priming (Neely, 1991) in that both congruent and
incongruent prime-target pairs are categorically related: Congruent primes and targets share the same category
membership (e.g., the category of positive words), incongruent primes and targets are members in semantically
opposite categories (e.g., the target is a member of the set of positive words, whereas the prime is a
member of the set of negative words). As pointed out by Lambert et al. (2003), a more appropriate structural
analogy than the semantic-priming paradigm is Jacoby’s (1991) process-dissociation paradigm. For congruent
prime-target pairs, responding on the basis of the target as well as responding on the basis of the prime lead to
the correct answer. In the language of the process-dissociation method, responding in a controlled way to the
target word leads to the same response as responding in the absence of control to the task-irrelevant prime
word. For incongruent prime-target pairs, responding in a controlled way to the target and responding to
the task-irrelevant prime in the absence of control lead to contradictory responses. Unintentional influences
of the prime word are reflected in differences in performance for targets in congruent relative to incongruent
pairings.

(from here).

Also, this study is on shaky ground with how you interpret the results, even if you assume that their process and results are accurate the way they are reported. Is semantic/associative congruence actually a sign of repressed sexual desire? Or it is indicative of a wider conceptual processing trend with the way language is structured with relation to terms of sexual identity? Is the priming even a result of a semantic or associative link, or is it morphophonological, or something else? As the paper I just posted indicates:

Finally, Greenwald and Abrams (2002) found that even single consonants (repeated
in a letter string, e.g., LLLLL) from prior targets (tulip) can have this [priming] effect. The explanations that were proposed
for these findings differ in several respects, as explained next, but they agree that masked primes are not
processed as deeply as targets, typically only at the level of word fragments of one or more letters, undermining
the hope to demonstrate semantic processing of subliminal primes by means of category congruency
priming.

(sic)


EDIT: Anyway, I am skeptical until I can get a copy of the paper myself to look through.

[Sriad]

Well ... the lack of any sort of control group is pretty damning. They don't seem to be comparing their results against anything, they got the data from their priming study (and log-transformed it, which is always a bit of a red flag, as it's a great way to "force" the data into conforming to a trend that may or may not exist) and claim it supports an obviously preconceived hypothesis. Also, it's not even designed the way a priming study is supposed to be set up, which should be more like this...

Ugh, I didn't even notice that part. 'swhat I get for not reading critically.

[Ziggy Stardust]

Ugh, I didn't even notice that part. 'swhat I get for not reading critically.

Well, to be fair this is just speculation on my part, since I can't get a copy of the paper itself. But the religious orientation study they did lacked a control group, and it specifically notes that it was modeled after the sexual orientation study, so I am just making an assumption.