1. Effect of Gender Cues in Audio Narratives on Same-Gender Attracted Women’s Psychophysiological Sexual Arousal

Abstract

The purpose of my honours thesis project is to gain further understanding of subjective and genital arousal patterns of women who have varying degrees of same-genderattractions. While other-gender attracted women show a category-nonspecific or generalized pattern of sexual response to their preferred and nonpreferred gender, samegenderattracted women show a category-specific pattern of responding, with significantly greater sexual response to their preferred gender, when exposed to lowintensity audiovisual stimuli (Chivers, Seto, & Blanchard, 2007). Past research has examined same-gender attracted women’s sexual responses to audiovisual stimuli (Chivers et al., 2007) and other-gender attracted women’s sexual responses to audio narratives (Chivers & Timmers, in press); however, no research to date has focused on same-gender attracted women’s sexual responses to audio narratives, which is a less intense stimulus modality (e.g., Heiman, 1980). Study procedure involved presentation of sexual and nonsexual audio narratives, which described interactions with male and female partners, to women with varying degrees of same-gender attractions. I will examine the category-specificity of same-gender attracted women’s genital and subjective sexual response. I expect that same-gender attracted women will have a category-specific pattern of sexual response, with significantly greater genital and subjective sexual arousal to sexual stories featuring a female partner. Also, I expect that genital and subjective arousal to sexual stories featuring a female partner will increase with degree of samegenderattraction.