Measuring Implicit Sexual Response Biases to Nude Male and Female Pictures in Androphilic and Gynephilic Men

Snowden, Wichter, and Gray (2008) demonstrated that an Implicit Association Test and a Priming Task both predicted the sexual orientation of gynephilic and androphilic men in terms of their attraction biases towards pictures of nude males and females. For both measures, relative bias scores were obtained, with no information on the separate response biases to each target gender. 

The present study sought to extend this research by assessing both relative and individual implicit biases using the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP). An explicit measure screened for men with androphilic (n = 16) or gynephilic (n = 16) orientations on the dimensions of "sexual attraction," "sexual behavior," "sexual fantasies," "hetero/gay lifestyle," and "self identification." The IRAP involved responding "True" or "False" to pictures of nude males and females as either attractive or unattractive. Participants were required to respond in a manner consistent with their reported sexual orientation for half of the IRAP's test blocks and inconsistent for the other half. Response latencies were recorded and analyzed. 

The IRAP revealed a non-orthogonal pattern of biases across the two groups and had an excellent ability to predict sexual orientation with areas under the curves of 1.0 for the relative bias score and .94 and .95 for the bias scores for the male and female pictures, respectively. Correlations between the IRAP and explicit measures of sexual orientation were consistently high. The findings support the IRAP as a potentially valuable tool in the study of sexual preferences.

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By:  Timmins L1, Barnes-Holmes D2, Cullen C3.

• 1Department of Psychology, Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, 5th Floor, Bermondsey Wing, Guy's Hospital Campus, London, SE1 9RT, UK. liam.timmins@kcl.ac.uk.
• 2Department of Experimental, Clinical and Health Psychology, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium.
• 3School of Nursing & Human Sciences, Dublin City University, Dublin 9, Ireland. 
• Arch Sex Behav. 2016 Mar 14.

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Virtual Viewing Time: The Relationship between Presence and Sexual Interest in Androphilic and Gynephilic Men

Below: Schematic overview of the three experimental conditions.

In the conventional condition virtual characters were presented on a standard desktop PC enabling only monoscopic viewing, no head tracking and no interactivity. In the immersive condition a Head Mounted Display (HMD) was used, enabling stereoscopic viewing and head tracking. The immersive+ condition used the same technical equipment as the immersive condition, but additionally allowed the participant to turn around the virtual human characters. Note that the procedure was exactly the same in all three experimental conditions.

Virtual Reality (VR) has successfully been used in the research of human behavior for more than twenty years. The main advantage of VR is its capability to induce a high sense of presence. This results in emotions and behavior which are very close to those shown in real situations. In the context of sex research, only a few studies have used high-immersive VR so far. The ones that did can be found mostly in the field of forensic psychology. Nevertheless, the relationship between presence and sexual interest still remains unclear. The present study is the first to examine the advantages of high-immersive VR in comparison to a conventional standard desktop system regarding their capability to measure sexual interest. 25 gynephilic and 20 androphilic healthy men underwent three experimental conditions, which differed in their ability to induce a sense of presence. In each condition, participants were asked to rate ten male and ten female virtual human characters regarding their sexual attractiveness. Without their knowledge, the subjects’ viewing time was assessed throughout the rating. Subjects were then asked to rate the sense of presence they had experienced as well as their perceived realism of the characters. Results suggested that stereoscopic viewing can significantly enhance the subjective sexual attractiveness of sexually relevant characters. Furthermore, in all three conditions participants looked significantly longer at sexually relevant virtual characters than at sexually non-relevant ones. The high immersion condition provided the best discriminant validity. From a statistical point of view, however, the sense of presence had no significant influence on the discriminant validity of the viewing time task. The study showed that high-immersive virtual environments enhance realism ratings as well as ratings of sexual attractiveness of three-dimensional human stimuli in comparison to standard desktop systems. Results also show that viewing time seems to be influenced neither by sexual attractiveness nor by realism of stimuli. This indicates how important task specific mechanisms of the viewing time effect are.

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