Sexual orientation is one of the largest sex differences in humans. The vast majority of the population is heterosexual, that is, they are attracted to members of the opposite sex. However, a small but significant proportion of people are bisexual or homosexual and experience attraction to members of the same sex. The origins of the phenomenon have long been the subject of scientific study. In ...

OBJECTIVE Effectively addressing health disparities experienced by sexual minority populations requires high-quality official data on sexual orientation. We developed a conceptual framework of sexual orientation to improve the quality of sexual orientation data in New Zealand's Official Statistics System. METHODS We reviewed conceptual and methodological literature, culminating in a draft fra...

In recent population-based surveys, minority sexual orientation has been identified as a potential risk indicator for psychiatric morbidity. However, methodological limitations in the studies to date have led to concerns that current estimates are biased due to inadequate measurement of sexual orientation and uncontrolled confounding from prevalent HIV infection. In the present study, the autho...

People can accurately infer others' traits and group memberships across several domains. We examined heterosexual women's accuracy in judging male sexual orientation across the fertility cycle (Study 1) and found that women's accuracy was significantly greater the nearer they were to peak ovulation. In contrast, women's accuracy was not related to their fertility when they judged the sexual ori...

Affective and cognitive factors play an important role in the activation and regulation of men's sexual arousal. Barlow (1986) argued that initial affective reactions determine the allocation of attention to sexual stimuli. We applied Barlow's model to our understanding of the role of sexual arousal in sexual orientation, where sexual arousal patterns have consistently been found to be congruen...

Many studies have examined differences in sexual behavior based upon self-identified sexual orientation, with results often indicating that those with same-sex partners engage in greater risk behaviors than those with opposite sex partners. However, few of those studies consisted of large, national sample studies. To address that gap, the present study examined the relationship between sexual o...

We recruited twins systematically from the Australian Twin Registry and assessed their sexual orientation and 2 related traits: childhood gender nonconformity and continuous gender identity. Men and women differed in their distributions of sexual orientation, with women more likely to have slight-to-moderate degrees of homosexual attraction, and men more likely to have high degrees of homosexua...

The present study examined how well implicit measures were able to predict sexual orientation. Most previous research in the sexual orientation domain has been dependent upon self-report, which requires explicit, conscious awareness of sexual orientation and/or erotic preferences. On the other hand, implicit measurements are thought to be able to reflect immediate automatic reactions that may n...

Sexual obsessions are a common symptom of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) that may be particularly troubling to patients. However, little research has examined concerns surrounding sexual orientation, which includes obsessive doubt about one's sexual orientation, fears of becoming homosexual, or fears that others might think one is homosexual. The present study reports rates and related cha...

background: despite growing interest in the public health of sexual minority, youth around the world due to the high rates of suicidal ideation and attempts in this population, few studies on the sexual orientation of korean adolescents have been conducted. therefore, this study investigated the relationship between the sexual orientation of korean adolescents and their suicide-related behavior...