In this video I briefly describe research related to development of sexual orientation, with a focus on homosexuality. Despite Freud’s emphasis on identification, there doesn’t seem to be a relationship between parenting and sexual orientation. Twin studies have suggested that genes play a role in sexual orientation, though not a determining one. The womb environment may matter, particularly when it comes to prenatal levels of hormones, particularly testosterone. Differences in cultural practices and homosexual behaviors during adolescence don’t seem to have a strong impact on later orientation. Lastly I consider the perceived importance of sexual orientation as a part of one’s identity, which may vary between individuals and between cultures.
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Video Transcript
Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In this video we’re going to consider the development of sexual orientation with an emphasis on understanding homosexuality. So in the unit on personality, I talked about the psychoanalytic approach to personality and this included the Freudian idea of identification. This was the idea that during the phallic stage of Freud’s psychosexual stages of development, the child identifies with the same-sex parent and this is how the child acquires proper gender roles. So the idea would be if there was a fixation or a problem in development during this phallic stage the child might not identify properly with the same-sex parent and this might lead to the development of abnormal sexual behaviors; things like sexual fetishes or homosexuality.
Now, it probably doesn’t surprise you to learn that there’s really no evidence for this psychoanalytic approach to understanding sexual orientation. In fact, there’s really no specific aspects of parenting that are associated with sexual orientation and this includes the parents’ orientation. So it’s not the case that gay parents are more likely to have gay children.
Now, we could also consider the role of genes on sexual orientation and one way we could do this is by looking at twin studies. So one such twin study by Bailey and Pillard in 1991 looked at sets of male twins, and these were dizygotic twins and monozygotic twins, and the idea was if one twin is homosexual, what are the odds the other twin is also homosexual? So in the case of dizygotic twins, if one twin was gay then the other twin was gay about 22% of the time. But in monozygotic twins, who share more genes, if one twin was gay, the odds of the other also being gay were 52%. This suggests that genes are playing a role in sexual orientation because we see the more genes the twins are sharing here, that they also are more likely to share their sexual orientation.
But of course this leaves plenty of room for environmental influence. It’s not the case that genes are dictating sexual orientation. So how might the environment be playing a role? Well, again, we have the idea that genes are involved, this means environment isn’t dictating sexual orientation. And another way we can see that is that we don’t know of specific environmental factors that might cause somebody to be gay. This can be seen in different cultural rituals that involve the performance of what we might consider to be homosexual acts. So there are cultures where adolescent boys will perform homosexual acts on older men in the tribe and what we don’t see in these cultures is corresponding increases in these boys identifying as homosexual later. And so this suggests that these acts are not making them gay.
So when we think about environmental influence on sexual orientation, it’s probably the case that we’re talking about very early environment. So this brings us to consider the environment of the womb and that prenatal hormone levels seem to be associated with sexual orientation later in life, particularly the level of testosterone in the womb.
Now we can also think about differences between males and females in the development of their sexual orientations. So in the case of males who are homosexual they usually report feeling their first same-sex attraction sometime around age 8 and it’s important to note that this is before puberty. And they often report later in life feeling that they’ve always been gay that they always felt this way; they don’t remember a time where they didn’t feel this. Whereas females report less early certainty. So in homosexual females they don’t report that they’ve always felt that they were gay and they tend to have a more fluid or flexible approach to thinking about who they’ve been attracted to over time. This idea that females experience this is referred to as “erotic plasticity“; that females tend to be more plastic in their sexual orientations.
And the last thing we can think about is how much we might consider sexual orientation in terms of how integral a part of somebody’s identity it is. And it’s important to note that there’s variation here, there’s variation amongst individuals but also variation in terms of culture in terms of how much importance we place on somebody’s sexual orientation in terms of who they are. Is it a defining feature of the person, the fact that they’re gay? Or that they identify as homosexual or that they engage in certain homosexual behaviors? And how much emphasis should we place on these things? How important are specific behaviors in terms of somebody’s identity? What is the meaning of these behaviors or how much should this be a part of their identity?
We should recognize that, of course, there’ll be variation in these different factors; in how much we see sexual behavior as part of somebody’s overall identity. I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!
