Monday, August 6, 2012

There's Gayness in Your Eyes: New Study Confirms Sexual Orientation in Pupil Dilation


It's in the eyes! Cornell University confirms the notion that a person’s sexual orientation can be seen by how their pupils dilate:
“There is a popular belief that sexual orientation can be revealed by pupil dilation to attractive people, yet until now there was no scientific evidence. For the first time, researchers at Cornell University used a specialized infrared lens to measure pupillary changes to participants watching erotic videos. Pupils were highly telling: they widened most to videos of people who participants found attractive, thereby revealing where they were on the sexual spectrum from heterosexual to homosexual. . . 

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.”
Wow! See more here

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Interesting. So I take it the observation is passive. Be interesting to repeat Kinsey's studies only this time use this to determine interest.

I bet you'd get a much more accurate read with a large enough sample. I'd say spread it across 100 college campuses in the U.S. with at least 100 participants at each. That'd be a sample of 10,000 people - big enough I'd imagine.

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Viktor is a small town southern boy living in Los Angeles. You can find him on Twitter, writing about pop culture, politics, and comics. He’s the creator of the graphic novel StrangeLore and currently getting back into screenwriting.