Psychology
Sexual Orientation
Sexual orientation refers to an individual's enduring pattern of romantic or sexual attraction to others. It is often categorized as heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual, but can also encompass other orientations. Sexual orientation is a fundamental aspect of a person's identity and can influence their relationships, self-concept, and overall well-being.
Written by Perlego with AI-assistance
Related key terms
1 of 5
11 Key excerpts on "Sexual Orientation"
eBook - ePub- Justin J. Lehmiller(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
Before we do that, however, it is important to acknowledge that there is no universally agreed-upon definition of this concept. Some people view Sexual Orientation as a matter of sexual attraction (i.e., who do you find sexually desirable?). Others view it as a matter of sexual behavior (i.e., who do you have sex with?). Yet others view it as a matter of psychological identity or labels (i.e., do you identify as gay, straight, bisexual, or something else?). Scientists adopt different definitions to suit their research purposes. For example, researchers in medicine and public health often focus on behavior and tend not to concern themselves with matters of identity because they want to understand infection risk. In contrast, researchers in psychology tend to focus more on attraction and identity because they are more concerned with how sexuality is perceived and psychologically experienced. These variable definitions have the effect of making the literature on Sexual Orientation difficult to decipher at times. For instance, as you will see in the next section, the way you define “Sexual Orientation” significantly affects prevalence estimates (e.g., consider that far more people have engaged in same-sex behavior than identify as gay or bisexual). Thus, when talking about Sexual Orientation, it is important to look at it through a broad lens that takes into account attraction, behavior, and identity, and recognize that these factors may express themselves very differently in different individuals. For purposes of this textbook, we will therefore define Sexual Orientation as the unique pattern of sexual and romantic desire, behavior, and identity that each person expresses. Sexual Orientation can take many forms. Many people tend to think of it as comprising just three categories: heterosexual (interest in members of the other sex), homosexual (interest in members of the same sex), and bisexual (interest in men and women)
No longer available |Learn more- (Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Library Press(Publisher)
Doubts have been raised about the validity of this concept in non-Western and indigenous societies, as well as in the pre-modern West. While Sexual Orientation is reported in this article primarily within biology and psychology, including sexology, for reports within anthropology and history, including social constructionism. Sexual Orientation distinguished from sexual identity and behavior Most definitions of Sexual Orientation include a psychological component, such as the direction of an individual's erotic desire, and/or a behavioral component, which focuses on the sex of the individual's sexual partner/s. Some people prefer simply to follow an individual's self-definition or identity. ________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ________________________ The American Psychological Association states that Sexual Orientation is an enduring emotional, romantic, sexual, or affectional attraction toward others. It is easily distin-guished from other components of sexuality including biological sex, gender identity (the psychological sense of being male or female), and the social gender role (adherence to cultural norms for feminine and masculine behavior). Sexual Orientation exists along a continuum that ranges from exclusive heterosexuality to exclusive homosexuality and includes various forms of bisexuality. Bisexual persons can experience sexual, emotional, and affectional attraction to both their own sex and the opposite sex. Persons with a homoSexual Orientation are sometimes referred to as gay (both men and women) or as lesbian (women only). Sexual Orientation is different from sexual behavior because it refers to feelings and self-concept. Individuals may or may not express their Sexual Orientation in their behaviors.
eBook - PDF- Beverly Greene, Gladys Croom, Beverly A. Greene, Gladys L. Croom(Authors)
- 1999(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications, Inc(Publisher)
Sexual Orientation parallels these topics and provides a way of exploring them in greater depth and richness by comparing and contrasting those issues with sexual orienta-tion issues. It may also be noted that the study of Sexual Orientation is firmly within the realm of developmental psychology. There are several exam-ples of developmental theories of Sexual Orientation in the literature. The Sexual Orientation in Life Span Psychology I 61 most widely recognized is the Freudian idea of developmental arrest as a result of an unresolved Oedipal conflict during childhood; nonetheless, Freud was an early supporter of civil rights for homosexuals (Bern, 1993). Another developmental model is Sullivan's (1953) idea of the lust dynamism emerging and its dynamic interplay with a préadolescent same-sex chumship; Sullivan is widely known to have been homosexual (Allen, 1995). Storms (1981) found that early pubertal maturation during the period of same-sex social intimacy was associated with homoerotic fantasy in college students and hypothesized that contiguous learning may be a factor in Sexual Orientation. More recently, Bern (1996) synthe-sized several models and hypothesized that children find erotic those (exotic) people who engage in activity that is gender-related and differ-ent from one's own activity. In addition, many theorists have speculated about the role of early childhood experiences, gender nonconformity, early sexual experiences, abuse, and unsatisfactory heterosexual trials in developing a same-gender Sexual Orientation. Moreover, the develop-mental effect of Sexual Orientation is clearly life span in nature, with con-tinuity of Sexual Orientation, even beyond the years of sexual activity, as the typical pattern (Money, 1988). Finally, bisexual persons may show developmental patterns such as sequential periods of homosexual and heterosexual attractions, and illustrate the need for a multidimensional model of Sexual Orientation (Fox, 1995).
eBook - PDFHomosexuality
Research Implications for Public Policy
- John C. Gonsiorek, James D. Weinrich, John C. Gonsiorek, James D. Weinrich(Authors)
- 1991(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications, Inc(Publisher)
1 The Definition and Scope of Sexual Orientation John C. Gonsiorek James D. Weinrich The question of precisely who is and who is not homosexual is itself controversial. Various behaviors and individual life-styles have been confused with Sexual Orientation. Shively and De Cecco (1977) devel-oped a useful distinction in dividing sexual identity into four parts. The first is biological sex, the genetic material encoded in chromosomes. The next is gender identity, the psychological sense of being male or female. Social sex role is adherence to the culturally created behaviors and atti-tudes that are deemed appropriate for males or females. Finally, Sexual Orientation is erotic and/or affectional disposition to the same and/or opposite sex. It is important to note that the first three bear no necessary relation-ship to Sexual Orientation in any given individual. Each, however, has been confused with Sexual Orientation. Variations on these parameters (e.g., cross-dressing, sadomasochism, and fetishism) are not discussed here because they occur among both heterosexuals and homosexuals and are not specific to Sexual Orientation. Gay and lesbian are popular terms for people who define themselves as homosexual in contrast to the term straight used by gay people to describe heterosexuals, but also widely used by heterosexuals in other contexts. It is also important to note that a person's sexual behavior can be homosexual yet that person may not self-identify as gay. The process of coming out and defining oneself as gay, together with the additional act of coming out publicly as gay, can create pro-found events in the lives of homosexual men and women living in a disparaging society, as described by Gonsiorek and Rudolph in this volume. Perhaps because of this, the term sexual preference is sometimes used. It might appear to outsiders that individuals going through this process have chosen their homosexuality. We suggest that the term 1
eBook - PDFSexuality Now
Embracing Diversity
- Janell Carroll(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Cengage Learning EMEA(Publisher)
We discuss this research throughout this chapter. What Determines Sexual Orientation? How should we categorize a person’s Sexual Orientation? The simplest way to categorize a person’s Sexual Orientation seems to be through sexual behavior; that is, with whom does the person have sex? However, there are many other factors to consider. What about a person’s sexual fantasies? If a man sometimes fantasizes about sex with men, even though he considers himself straight and has sex only with women, what is his Sexual Orientation? LGBTQ Acronym for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, or questioning (or queer) adults or youth. Sexual Orientation The gender(s) that a person is attracted to emotionally, physically, sexually, and romantically. straight Slang term for heterosexual. heterosexual People who are erotically attracted to members of the other sex. homosexual People who are erotically attracted to members of the same sex. bisexual People who are erotically attracted to members of either sex (may also be referred to as pansexual). androsexual Being primarily emotionally, physi- cally, sexually, and/or romantically attracted to some men, males, and/or masculinity. asexual A person who experiences little or no sexual attraction to others and/ or a lack of interest in sexual relation- ships/behavior. Some researchers have proposed that asexuality is a Sexual Orientation. gynesexual Being primarily emotionally, physi- cally, sexually, and/or romantically attracted to some women, females, and/or femininity. pansexual A person who experiences emo- tional, physical, sexual, and/or romantic attraction for members of all gender identities/expressions. skoliosexual Being primarily emotionally, physically, sexually, and/or romantically attracted to some genderqueer, transgender, and non-binary people. Same-sex marriage is now legal in the entire United States after a Supreme Court ruling in 2015 struck down state marriage bans.
eBook - ePub- Noretta Koertge(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
While declaring that homosexuality is multifaceted, investigators at the Institute for Sex Research (Bell & Weinberg, 1978; Kinsey, et al., 1948, 1953; Weinberg & Williams, 1974) have assessed Sexual Orientation as a unitary phenomenon, as physical behavior and feeling. The original Kinsey group (1948, 1953) recognized that psychic reactions (i.e., physical attraction to desired partners) as well as physical contact and orgasms had to be considered in classifying individuals on the heterosexual-homosexual scale, even though they observed that most of their respondents received parallel ratings. Bell and Weinberg (1978, p. 35) used two Kinsey scales, one for assessing physical contact, the other for sexual feelings, and developed a summary measure of 0 to 12. A respondent was assigned to the homosexual group if her or his score was 4 or more. After identifying the homosexual respondents, however, the authors did not then investigate how the ratings might be related to the variations found in sexual, social, and psychological adjustment.In order for research on Sexual Orientation to advance during the 1980s, it will be necessary to study the relationships among emotions, fantasies, and the physical aspects of sex, and to explore how societies and cultures determine which aspects of sexuality are to be suppressed, suffered, or enjoyed. To identify and combine the major strands of experience that comprise Sexual Orientation, investigators at the Center for Homosexual Education, Evaluation and Research (C.H.E.E.R.) have conceptualized Sexual Orientation as a distinct component of sexual identity, embracing physical, interpersonal, and intrapsychic factors (Shively & De Cecco, 1977). In this conceptualization there are four components: (1) biological sex, (2) gender identity, (3) social sex-role, and (4) Sexual Orientation. Biological sex designates the sex of the neonate as female or male, a determination usually made by the obstetrician upon delivery of the infant. In most instances the chromosomal sex and the morphological sex are congruent. When they are not, doctors have been known to be mistaken, as in the case of hermaphrodites. Gender identity refers to the individual's basic conviction of being female or male. This conviction is not necessarily contingent upon the individual's biological sex. In the case of post-operative transsexuals, gender identity is congruent with morphological but not with chromosomal sex. Gender identity is usually present by the time the child begins to talk. Social sex-role identifies the physical and psychological characteristics that are culturally associated with females or males. Social sex-role stereotypes are cultural expectations of appropriate physical and psychological characteristics of females and males. These characteristics are perceived as feminine or masculine. Six aspects of social sex-roles have been identified (Shively, Rudolph, & De Cecco, 1978): physical appearance, personality, mannerisms, speech, interests, and habits. Sexual Orientation refers to the individual's physical sexual activity with, interpersonal affection for, and erotic fantasies about members of the same or opposite biological sex. Physical sexual activity designates the individual's erotic body contact with one or more persons; this may or may not include genital contact. Interpersonal affection refers to associations, involving varying degrees of love or trust, with coworkers, friends, lovers, and marital partners. These relationships do not necessarily include or exclude physical sexual activity. Erotic fantasies
eBook - ePub- Michael R. Kauth(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
behaviors of men are differentially related to Sexual Orientation, but only insomuch as the pool of potential mates for gay men consists of other men and their sociosexual attitudes, and is not impacted by the relatively restricted attitudes of women. The sexual psychology of women across cultures also shows a distinctive, recurring pattern. In general, heterosexual women and lesbians share many of the same features (e.g., restricted sociosexuality), whereas bisexual women across all cultures tend to be more unrestricted in terms of both attitudes and behaviors.Issues for Further Consideration
In the ISDP, Sexual Orientation was primarily measured with a simple categorical item in which participants circled one of three choices: heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual. The use of simple self-identification for assessing Sexual Orientation is problematic (Gonsiorek & Weinrich, 1995; Haslam, 1997). In the current study, scores on self-identification categories did converge with the bipolar measure of Sexual Orientation from the Sexy Seven measure (Schmitt & Buss, 2000). Still, individual differences in Sexual Orientation cannot be fully measured by unidimensional characterizations or trichotomous constructs, although Sexual Orientation is most commonly measured in this way (Chung & Katayama, 1996). Moreover, same-sex Sexual Orientations are not the same as same-sex sexual behaviors (Muscarella, 1999), and gays and lesbians may define “sexual behavior” in different ways than do heterosexuals (Carpenter, 2001; Vohs, Catanese, & Baumeister, 2004), particularly across cultures. Indeed, self-labeling as a homosexual or bisexual carries with it extreme social costs in many non-Western cultures, something not fully accounted for in the current study. In the future, measurements of the full spectrum of Sexual Orientations and specific sexual behaviors are needed to more formally evaluate evolutionary perspectives on human mating.
eBook - PDF- Louis Diamant, Richard McAnulty(Authors)
- 1995(Publication Date)
- Greenwood(Publisher)
Gender and gender roles are social construc- tions. Gender-typic social behaviors do not predict emotional attraction, erotic fan- tasies, or sexual behavior. 5. Homosexuality and heterosexuality are variants of human sexuality. Across cultures, bisexual behavior may be more common than either exclusive heterosexuality or homosexuality. 6. Human bisexuality may serve to facilitate and maintain a variety of social relation- ships with men and women, which may be advantageous to the individual and the species. 7. Prenatal and postnatal hormonalization does not affect Sexual Orientation directly. Hormones influence the perception and meaning of environmental stimuli and facil- itate learned associations that canalize sexual feelings and behaviors. 8. Prenatal hormonalization produces a bisexual potentiality or range of sexual attrac- tion. Behavior within that range depends on the social environment and individual reinforcement history. Those with a restricted range of attraction may have a more inflexible Sexual Orientation. 9. Plasticity of sexual attraction may decline over time and with consistent reinforce- ment of habitual behavior. However, plasticity is probably a function of the breadth of initial range of potentiality. People with a restricted range may have little flexi- bility; those with a wide range of attraction may retain considerable potentiality through adulthood. 10. Rather than a plane, Sexual Orientation may be better understood as a circle, with monosexuality at the top and bisexuality at the bottom (figure 4.2). Opposite-sex attraction may be placed on the left hemisphere of the circle, and same-sex attraction would fall on the right. The midpoint of the circle would represent asexuality. A circle symbolizes the range and fluidity of Sexual Orientation and suggests common elements of monosexual attraction. Structure of the Model Given the reasoning just presented, a single factor theory of Sexual Orientation would be inadequate.
eBook - PDF- Richard B. Hays(Author)
- 1996(Publication Date)
- Yale University Press(Publisher)
Q U E S T I O N 8 Sexual Orientation: Is It Determined by Biology? One of the most dramatic changes in psychology and psychiatry in the past thirty years has been the movement away from viewing lesbianism and homosexuality as deviant. Until mid-century, the traditional approach was to treat homosexuals and lesbians as deeply disturbed deviants in need of treatment. Bonnie Strickland, one of the pioneers in fashioning a new view of homosexuality, says she feels privileged to be part of a new wave of psycholo-gists who are documenting that gay and lesbian people are not diseased and perverted (1995, p. 139). The shift in the attitude toward homosexuality may have begun with the publication of the research of Kinsey and his associates (Kinsey et al., 1953). Homosexuality, along with other behaviors thought to be abnormal, was shown by Kinsey to be fairly widespread. In addition to the finding that 8 percent of men and 4 percent of women had been exclusively homosexual for a period of at least three years during adulthood, the Kinsey group found that 37 percent of men and 20 percent of women reported at least one homosexual experience that resulted in orgasm. Breaking with past patterns of research, which focused on lesbians who were patients in psychotherapy, investigators began to study lesbians who were not in therapy. Reviews of this literature (Mannion, 1981) indicated that the psycho-logical adjustment of these lesbians did not differ significantly from that of heterosexual women, and, in some cases, the lesbians were less neurotic than their heterosexual counter-parts. The changing view of homosexuality is underscored by the reversal of the American Psychiatric Association's position. The 1968 edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-II), the association's bible for making psychiatric diagnoses, classified homosexuality along with disorders such as child molestation as a sexual deviance.
- David L. Hull, Michael Ruse(Authors)
- 2007(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
My purpose here is not to debate the distinctions, but to discuss the best science we have available today as it is applied to the distinctions as commonly understood by both experts in the field and the public at large. I have structured this article around the sorts of questions students or people unfamiliar with recent work in the field might ask. 291 christopher horvath how do scientists define Sexual Orientation? The Kinsey Scale (Kinsey, Pomeroy, and Martin 1948) has become the standard way to operationalize Sexual Orientation in almost all scientific studies of the phenomenon. Study participants are asked a series of questions about their sexual desires, behaviors, fantasies, and self-identity. On the basis of the answers given to these ques- tions, each participant’s Sexual Orientation is classified somewhere along a unidimensional linear scale where 0 ¼ exclusively hetero- sexual and 6 ¼ exclusively homosexual. Some researchers weight the answers to certain questions more heavily than others, depending on the nature of the study. Those who are interested in investigating Sexual Orientation as a set of erotic desires directing sexual attraction towards particular kinds of people usually weigh the answers about desires and fantasies higher than the answers about behavior. This would seem a perfectly rea- sonable bias. To say that virgins have no Sexual Orientation simply because they are virgins would be to fly in the face of hundreds of years of romantic literature as well as most people’s personal experience. It is also obviously true that people who find themselves living or working within very homophobic environments might never act on their true sexual desires out of fear of reprisal or rejection. Critics of biological explanations of Sexual Orientation argue that the conception of sexual attraction implicit in the Kinsey test is inadequate because it treats Sexual Orientation as a discrete trait with clearly defined boundaries (e.g., Stein 1999).
Available until 27 Jan |Learn more- Linda Garnets, Douglas Kimmel, Linda Garnets, Douglas Kimmel(Authors)
- 2003(Publication Date)
- Columbia University Press(Publisher)
any homosexual attractions or behavior indicated a homoSexual Orientation, and individuals who claimed a bisexual identity were seen as psychologically and socially maladjusted just as lesbians and gay men were considered maladjusted from the point of view of the illness model.At the same time, the results of research on human sexuality clearly indicated that many individuals have experienced both heterosexual and homosexual attractions and behavior. Furthermore, research found no indication of psychopathology in nonclinical samples of bisexual women and men, just as prior research had found no evidence of psychopathology in nonclinical samples of lesbians and gay men.No single pattern of homosexual and heterosexual attractions, behavior, and relationships characterizes self-identified bisexual men and women. Individuals arrive at their sexual identities by various routes. For some women and men, sexual identity remains constant, whereas for others, sexual identity varies in response to changes in sexual and emotional attractions, behavior, and relationships and the social and political contexts in which these occur. Finally, one of the main differences between bisexual men and women and gay men and lesbians is in the degree to which a visible community of similar others exists and serves to support the individual in the coming-out process. The extensive support networks that have developed in many communities have served this purpose for lesbians and gay men. While bisexual men and women often have looked to gay and lesbian communities for support and understanding regarding their homosexual interests and sexual minority status, the bisexual groups and organizations now emerging may be able to support them more effectively in the process of coming out bisexual and in their efforts to affiliate with other bisexual women and men.
Index pages curate the most relevant extracts from our library of academic textbooks. They’ve been created using an in-house natural language model (NLM), each adding context and meaning to key research topics.
