I am officially blaming Weaselking for introducing me to Baumeister and his evopsych rape shenanigans.
Anyway, here's the study at PlosOne (http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0040256). The images people were shown were 30-second video clips of people masturbating trawled from the net, and in between each lot of wank films the subjects were exposed to pastoral scenes, with the response to those clips being taken as the baseline eye dilation from which the reaction to the next set of wank clips was then judged in turn.
What the actual data shows is that while more heterosexual identifying women showed a "bisexual" response than heterosexual identifying men did, heterosexual identifying women showed more of a "bisexual" response than self identified bisexuals of either sex, even as male subjects (regardless of identification) were more likely to provide a "bisexual" response at all regardless of self identified sexual orientation than women, who aside from that initial cluster among self identified heterosexual women, showed clear "homosexual" or "heterosexual" responses all across the kinsey scale but rarely showed any "bisexual" responses at all from subjects with a Kinsey scale >0.
Bearing in mind that a "homosexual" response is when someone's eye ,on average, dilates more when viewing a person of the same sex masturbating compared to their response viewing a person of the opposite sex masturbating, and vice versa for a "heterosexual" response. A "bisexual" response in turn is a lack of correlation between eye dilation in response to images of a specific sex. Not to be confused with any notion that this study had a cluster of "bisexual" responses from its subjects who scored around 3 on the Kinsey scale, because they markedly didn't find that. as indeed neither sexes showed any clusters of "bisexual" responses from Kinsey 3 subjects, who merely lacked the extremely "homosexual" or "heterosexual" outliers found in the Kinsey 0 and 6 subjects respectively.
In fact, from looking at their data myself, It appears that it was only the outliers of the study group when taken in the context of the study as a whole that showed clear trends of any kind, as heterosexual subjects showed fewer really really "homosexual" responses, compared with homosexuals of either sex who showed actually quite a few "heterosexual" responses (on par with the average "heterosexual" responses shown by heterosexual subjects) but with a few really really "homosexual" respones as well (in fact, two lesbians showed stronger responses to "homosexual" stimuli than any homosexual man and these two responses were even stronger than any "heterosexual" response from anyone of either sex) to shift the line of best fit a bit higher than the line would have gone based on the majority of subjects only. Which means that any use for eye dilation as a "fruit machine" (to borrow the RCMP's term for such things) is largely disproven by this study.
Especially as, once their study group started wandering into kinsey 4-5 (for either gender) the actual distribution of "homosexual" and "heterosexual" responses seemed to be a random distribution either side of a "bisexual" response, rather than the smooth drifting away from the nonexistent "bisexual" baseline that should be produced by bisexual subjects if this pupil scanner + experimental mechanism were in fact a useful indicator of sexual preference.
Oh but the study has a couple of punchlines; The conclusions of the study are that men are less sexually plastic (which isn't justified by the data at all), lesbians are hyper-butch to a fault (!?) and then makes the very intersting suggestion that the ability for heterosexual women to be aroused by images of other women masturbating allows them to avoid being injured during heterosexual rape (I blame Baumeister).
To make up for unleashing that study on people, here's another study in PlosOne's psychology section called A Neural Network Model of Ventriloquism Effect and Aftereffect (http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0042503) which appears to be total Ignoble bate. Yes, it is in fact about actual ventriloquism but from a cognitive neuroscience perspective.
Woah! Okay, I didn't realise just how bad this study was. Goes to show I should always go back to the source. Also they only compared pupil dilation to self-reported sexual orientation, and not genital arousal at all. Surely if they wanted to establish a new measure they need to show how good it is against the genital arousal tests?
I had the same thought while reading it and they at least do mention comparing it to genital tests... as a possible follow up |:¬\ Linear arrangements of a cart and horses; How do they work?
(there's also work that really needs to be done to see what the full range of stimuli are that can cause notable pupil dilation, so that studies using the IR pupil thingie can properly control for those variables and do the p values properly. But for the specific usage they were supposedly testing, yeah)
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(no subject)
Date: 2012-08-08 03:56 am (UTC)Either that or all the heterosexual women they studied are really bisexual. *raises eyebrow*
(no subject)
Date: 2012-08-08 10:08 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-08-08 04:50 pm (UTC)Anyway, here's the study at PlosOne (http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0040256). The images people were shown were 30-second video clips of people masturbating trawled from the net, and in between each lot of wank films the subjects were exposed to pastoral scenes, with the response to those clips being taken as the baseline eye dilation from which the reaction to the next set of wank clips was then judged in turn.
What the actual data shows is that while more heterosexual identifying women showed a "bisexual" response than heterosexual identifying men did, heterosexual identifying women showed more of a "bisexual" response than self identified bisexuals of either sex, even as male subjects (regardless of identification) were more likely to provide a "bisexual" response at all regardless of self identified sexual orientation than women, who aside from that initial cluster among self identified heterosexual women, showed clear "homosexual" or "heterosexual" responses all across the kinsey scale but rarely showed any "bisexual" responses at all from subjects with a Kinsey scale >0.
Bearing in mind that a "homosexual" response is when someone's eye ,on average, dilates more when viewing a person of the same sex masturbating compared to their response viewing a person of the opposite sex masturbating, and vice versa for a "heterosexual" response. A "bisexual" response in turn is a lack of correlation between eye dilation in response to images of a specific sex. Not to be confused with any notion that this study had a cluster of "bisexual" responses from its subjects who scored around 3 on the Kinsey scale, because they markedly didn't find that. as indeed neither sexes showed any clusters of "bisexual" responses from Kinsey 3 subjects, who merely lacked the extremely "homosexual" or "heterosexual" outliers found in the Kinsey 0 and 6 subjects respectively.
In fact, from looking at their data myself, It appears that it was only the outliers of the study group when taken in the context of the study as a whole that showed clear trends of any kind, as heterosexual subjects showed fewer really really "homosexual" responses, compared with homosexuals of either sex who showed actually quite a few "heterosexual" responses (on par with the average "heterosexual" responses shown by heterosexual subjects) but with a few really really "homosexual" respones as well (in fact, two lesbians showed stronger responses to "homosexual" stimuli than any homosexual man and these two responses were even stronger than any "heterosexual" response from anyone of either sex) to shift the line of best fit a bit higher than the line would have gone based on the majority of subjects only. Which means that any use for eye dilation as a "fruit machine" (to borrow the RCMP's term for such things) is largely disproven by this study.
Especially as, once their study group started wandering into kinsey 4-5 (for either gender) the actual distribution of "homosexual" and "heterosexual" responses seemed to be a random distribution either side of a "bisexual" response, rather than the smooth drifting away from the nonexistent "bisexual" baseline that should be produced by bisexual subjects if this pupil scanner + experimental mechanism were in fact a useful indicator of sexual preference.
Oh but the study has a couple of punchlines; The conclusions of the study are that men are less sexually plastic (which isn't justified by the data at all), lesbians are hyper-butch to a fault (!?) and then makes the very intersting suggestion that the ability for heterosexual women to be aroused by images of other women masturbating allows them to avoid being injured during heterosexual rape (I blame Baumeister).
(no subject)
Date: 2012-08-08 05:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-08-08 09:37 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-08-08 09:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-08-09 01:15 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-08-09 02:46 am (UTC)(there's also work that really needs to be done to see what the full range of stimuli are that can cause notable pupil dilation, so that studies using the IR pupil thingie can properly control for those variables and do the p values properly. But for the specific usage they were supposedly testing, yeah)