Gee....Zjabs for one is shocked, shocked he says, shocked. Who woulda thunk it?
-Zjabs (Rochester's Official Columnist)
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It was something the LGBT community had suspected for years: ”homophobic attitudes are more likely to be more pronounced among those who have experienced unacknowledged attraction towards members of the same-sex.” The bully who teased you for months for being gay may probably grow up to be queerer than a three dollar bill and had strong feelings of lust for you. The Huffington Post reports the study is set to be published this month in the Journal of Personality and Society and was comprised for four separate experiments, where in each 160 college students partook, conducted in the U.S. and Germany. The findings provide brand new evidence that support ” the psychoanalytic theory that fear, anxiety, and aversion that toward gays and lesbians can grow out of a seemingly heterosexual individual’s own repressed same-sex desires.”
Co-author Richard Ryan, professor of psychology at the University of Rochester, helped direct the research and told Science Daily the following:
“In many cases these are people who are at war with themselves and they are turning this internal conflict outward. We laugh at or make fun of such blatant hypocrisy, but in a real way, these people may often themselves be victims of repression and experience exaggerated feelings of threat. Homophobia is not a laughing matter.”
The International Business Times explained the procedures for the experiment:
“The implicit and explicit sexual orientations of participants were measured by how they reacted to words, and images with sexual associations, during a split-second timed task.
Students were shown connotative words, and pictures of straight and gay couples, while the computer tracked precisely the time they took to respond. They were also asked to agree or disagree on statements like, “I felt controlled and pressured in certain ways,” and “I felt free to be who I am,” to measure how democratic or authoritarian their parents were. For studying the level of homophobia in a household, participants responded statements like, “It would be upsetting for my mom to find out she was alone with a lesbian” or “My dad avoids gay men whenever possible.”
Subjects, who said they were heterosexual, but reported homosexual tendencies during tasks, were more likely to be hostile to gays, the study found.”
Lead author and University of Essex lecturer Netta Weinstein made the point that a lot of anti-gay figures, including Ted Haggard, have engaged in homosexual acts. She told the Daily Mail the following:
“Individuals who identify as straight but in psychological tests show a strong attraction to the same-sex may be threatened by gays and lesbians because homosexuals remind them of similar tendencies within themselves.”
© 2012 Zjabs - 4/15/12
