Day 13: Let's go to the videotape

For Andrew R., the relevant graphs from Adams et al. 1996.

The blocks are periods of forty seconds. I would say that the laboratory setting was not particularly inhibiting to subject reaction. It must have been the comfortable reclining chair.

Adams did not eliminate the alternate causal explanation of circumference increasing due to anxiety -- Intelligent Design, my ass -- so perhaps future experiments will include several minutes of anxiogenic video footage, say the last scene from Pink Flamingos. (No link. I have standards. Somewhere.) The resulting graph might need a negative y-axis.

Comments

[lala]

I was going to say, before, when I wasn't reading because I was on an island where they do not have the internet, that in the engineer/right-wing schema, there is homeschooling. always. every dad I meet is some kind of gainfully-employed, highly-compensated, right-brain-profession kind of a guy with about eight kids and some kind of quilty tallowdipper for a wife. this includes us, I know. well, us with contraception, anyway.

[Bernard Guerrero]

"so perhaps future experiments will include several minutes of anxiogenic video footage"

I'm picturing a montage: CNBC footage on a futures lock-limit-down morning, interspersed with shots of IRS stationary, police interrogators, hospital scenes and heavy bombers circa WW2. You can call it "40 Seconds Over...never mind.

[James Bodi]

How did they identify the phobes in order to group them? Self-reporting?

[Carlos]

Previously calibrated test in the literature.

The subjects do all self-report "completely heterosexual" on the Kinsey scale. Depressing: the authors note how difficult it was to find subjects at UGa who were strongly non-homophobic and Kinsey zeroes -- they wanted to test across the homophobia spectrum in four groups, but had to settle for the split.

[James Bodi]

Thanks. There's something to the theory - a friend of mine who's pretty obviously gay says it's often the one in a group whose given him the eye that says something derogatory. On the other hand, I think a lot of phobes are just asshats, or like the clients I was with last night, have a sexual maturity level of 13 (they were in the oil biz, and from Houston, which may have a little to do with it).

[Andrew R.]

I find it... intriguing that the folks who showed tumescence at the gay pr0n also showed such with the stuff aimed at straight men. There was a recent study done which proported to show that there is no such thing as male bisexuality--guys showing arousal at stuff aimed at both orientations would seem to indicate otherwise.