Comments on: Pupil dilation reveals sexual orientation in new Cornell study

By: christine j sojka

christine j sojka — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 00:30:36 +0000

i’m not a gay person but there are MANY good looking males THAT I DONT RESPOND TO AT ALL.some of these males are proffessional models.justin bieber is GREAT looking.I DONT RESPOND TO HIM.I DONT RESPOND TO FEMALES AT ALL EITHER.I’M NOT GAY.IT’S EXTREMELY RARE THAT I RESPOND TO ANYONE AT ALL THAT WAY.WHAT WOULD YOU CALL ME?

By: Bri

Bri — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 12:42:44 +0000

You bring up some important points that I’d like to add to. Before I do that, I can’t resist, with a name like Naked ape, you definitely are speaking from the Bonobo within. Our society used to be more matrilineal. I’ll never forget watching the movie What’s up doc with Barbara Striesand, when I was a child. I had no reaction to Babs for the entire movie, but then the scene came on where she slinks across the piano in a seductive way. I blushed!!! I was very young and didn’t know what was happening. I went beet red. A friend of Maralyn Monroe talked about walking down the street together. She was asking Norma about the character of Maralyn. Norman said ” do you want to see her, and then quickly donned the persona. She said it was amazing. Nobody noticed them when Norma was Norma. As sone as she started to move in the Maralyn manner, all the people noticed her. Some of this is readily noticeable to small girls as they enter puberty. They start to develope what I like to call ” headlights” or mammalian protuberances. You don’t need to follow the bouncing ball, to sing along with Mitch Miller. A well placed jiggle is all it takes to get someone to sing for thier supper. Lethal weapons they can be. Weapons of mass destruction. Yea they are going to have a lot of fun using this technique to plumb human behavior. There are going to be a lot of glassy eyed volunteers!

By: NakedApe

NakedApe — Sun, 12 Aug 2012 06:01:53 +0000

Yes, our sexuality is a very emotional topic. We should accept that it is NOT solely about reproduction otherwise we would all make love only 2 or 3 times in a lifetime or else have thousands of children. If sexual behaviour has other functions besides reproduction (which I am arguing is true) then it can find expression with a partner you like as a person, whether of the opposite sex or the same. I think it is high time that people recognized and acknowledged that our sexuality is only partially reproductive and serves many other, complex social functions. (Read up on our cousins, the Bonobo chimpanzees).
On an even more serious note, I think that it should be a part of the Charter of Human Rights for people to stop worrying about who is sleeping with whom (the only proviso being that they are consenting adults). This would immediately make it illegal to hate people on the basis of their sexual orientation, cut off little girls’ genitalia, murder teenage girls in ‘honour’ killings, harrass women because you want to have sex with them, force women to stay in abusive relationships, prevent women from accessing birth-control or safe abortions. Imagine a world like that — where no self-righteous busy-bodies force their ‘morality’ on any other human being. This would make the world a far better place.

By: Guillermo Valle

Guillermo Valle — Sat, 11 Aug 2012 13:11:27 +0000

But isnt this why averages and fit lines are calculated?

By: Robofan

Robofan — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 00:18:51 +0000

AZryan
You’re right, except it’s already happening, and we’re giving people the data to mine and correlate about us through social networking, comments and so on.

By: Durabys

Durabys — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 09:18:28 +0000

Or they dilate at all times..

By: Editor

Editor — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 07:01:09 +0000

The experimental design seems weak because it doesn’t control for other transient pupil-enlargement causes such as fear and anger by using additional physiological monitoring.

By: Dan Robinson

Dan Robinson — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 04:53:04 +0000

Couldn’t this principle be applied (and isn’t it) to many of other facets of life, and don’t each of these facets pollute findings about the others?

By: Bruce Wright

Bruce Wright — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 03:35:06 +0000

There’s certainly a pedophile orientation – being sexually attracted to children – but that in and of itself isn’t a crime (though acting upon it is). If you could identify such people before they commit a crime, it may be possible to provide them with psychological help that might be able to prevent them from committing a crime. I would hope that that would be what that kind of technology would be used for, not simply locking people away before they actually commit any crimes. This doesn’t look like it would be able to identify such people very reliably, however.

By: Bri

Bri — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 02:30:53 +0000

AZryan did you wake up grumpy? Gatorallin posted first about pedophiles . I intended my response to be cryptic. There are so many angles to take, on every aspect of this article. I didn’t want to commit to any one particular issue. Not to mention, I didn’t have the time. To fill out my initial statement, “at any age” I was referring to this technique being used on all age groups. By this we could have a better understanding of how pedophilia evolves. Food is important, but in my eyes, sexuality is responsible for far more human behavior. My mother was a psychologist. Her focus was PTSD. Approximately 70 percent of the cases are from sexual molestation. This typically happened at a very early age. Two to three years old. When I say, “I could fill up this web page” I mean that I have read mountains of literature in reference to human sexuality, and I would bore you to tears with all the examples. It’s a very charged emotional topic, that can make people fly into rage. I’ll give just a few examples and musings. To do justice to the subject, I would have to do such an introduction. A very famous case of PTSD, was of a senators daughter. She would go catatonic at night. Her heart rate would drop dangerously. Her breathing would almost stop. Doctors could find nothing wrong with her. After much effort they discovered her father had been sleeping with her since early childhood, and she did the physical response to block out the emotional pain. Can’t forget the Bobobos. Everybody likes to refer to the sexual similarities to our closest related species. They do everybody. Like the omnivorus comment. Doesn’t matter what age, or what coupling, there are no taboos. They don’t have religion, for them it’s natural. One of my personal favorites are dung beetles. Let’s just get out of the mammalian category for a sec. For many millions of years they have had the same homosexual issues, just in a slightly different form. The males compete for females. Over the corse of millions of years of evolution, they have diversified to all poop niches. Each subspecies has it’s own armaments for battle. Horns, antlers, you name it, they’ve got it. The female builds a borrow, and the males fight to protect thier mate. Some males in every species, don’t grow those armaments. They look like females. They burrow along side a real female’s den, and break in to inseminate the female. Bringing it back to us and culture, poligamy was widely practiced in the aboriginal world( not Australia). For the most part, a man could have as many wives as he could provide for. In rare instances polyandry is practiced. The show I saw on this was hilarious. The researcher was asking the man what he does if he comes home, and his wife was with another man. He said he would go to a friends house till she was finished. Another one was with a single family. I mean to say a women married all the men in the family. They shared intimacy based on age. Eldest first, all the way down to the age of puberty. Studies on sexuality, please , don’t get me started!!!!!

By: Chrispium

Chrispium — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 01:32:55 +0000

Asexuality?

By: eldras

eldras — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 23:31:58 +0000

There is a condition where the pupils dont dilate.

By: AZryan

AZryan — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 21:14:35 +0000

Pedophilia is the ‘act’ being the crime. You’re suggesting trying to convict people on thought crime like in 1984. Probably not a good idea.
We should probably stick to having actual evidence to imprison people.

Probably will happen though that everyone will start to know everything about everyone else and privacy will die. We’ll all be secretly recording everyone else. Video/Audio, testing everyone’s eyeballs, saliva, how they walk, what books they read, tracking their daily routines with GPS locations 24/7. Most everyone will be Big Brother. The government won’t even have to bother being corrupt spies. We’ll do it to ourselves.

By: AZryan

AZryan — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 20:57:27 +0000

Your ideas are a mess. The first sentence doesn’t make any sense at all. The second seems like a goofy figure of speech at best, since ‘filling a web page’ is nonsensical. And the third sentence is, at best, obvious and only part of the big picture of what drives us. Getting food is just as obvious and ‘key’.

By: Richard Sittel

Richard Sittel — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 19:04:49 +0000

Ha, I would love to see some of the gay bashers in Congress and the Tea Party take this test and see the results. I’d be willing to bet………

By: Bruce Wright

Bruce Wright — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 18:07:52 +0000

This is very interesting, but as I noted in my reply to GatorALLin, the range of responses is very high across the sexual orientation scale, to the extent that there is significant overlap between the responses of completely straight or completely gay individuals of both sexes. On its face, this makes the test practically useless for identifying the sexual orientation of specific individuals unless they test at one of the extremes of the scale (very high same-sex or opposite-sex pupil dilation). Obviously it’s much more useful as a measure of large populations, since the correlation is still pretty good over a large enough sample size.

The interesting question is, “what does this mean?” Is the pupil dilation test actually getting at the basic underlying neurological reality of an individual’s sexual orientation, or is it only measuring one of several competing neurological factors? If the former, that would tend to indicate that a significant number of individuals on both ends of the spectrum have their sexuality conditioned by non-biological factors (perhaps mostly events in childhood, perhaps also some adult experiences). It’s a common observation that many who claim to be “straight” are often bi or gay but try to repress that in order to fit into society better; this may be direct evidence of that. What’s somewhat surprising is that this would imply that the converse is also true: That some who self-identify as “gay” may in fact have biological responses more like straight individuals, but presumably because of life experiences have come to identify themselves as gay. (This is surprising because even today the stigma associated with the gay lifestyle would make it a more difficult choice for one’s life, and it’s somewhat surprising that some people might choose it even against their biological tendencies).

Somehow I suspect, however, that this is in fact measuring just one (or perhaps a small number of closely related) out of many underlying neurological processes that cooperate with an individual’s environment (particularly during childhood) to produce an adult person’s sexual orientation. Nothing else in human development and psychology appears to be particularly simple; why should sexual orientation be any different?

By: Bruce Wright

Bruce Wright — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 17:42:50 +0000

Dubious that you could use this very reliably to identify pedophiles – the distribution is very “loose” across the sexual orientation scale, which complicates things considerably. There’s an obvious question about what that means, but without more research it doesn’t look possible to use this to identify someone’s sexuality reliably without other clues, unless they’re at one of the extreme ends of the response scale. As it stands, it’s more useful in studying populations, not individuals.

By: GreenSamurai

GreenSamurai — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 16:59:29 +0000

Isn’t that a thought crime?

By: Mortran

Mortran — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 16:32:26 +0000

Pedophile inclination itself is not illegal, only acting on it. So you can’t “catch” anybody this way.

By: Nikolaj

Nikolaj — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 16:23:58 +0000

I hope you mean when they are suspected of doing harm to others.

By: rob falgiano

rob falgiano — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 16:06:16 +0000

Possibly. But that’s a slipperly slope there. If someone shows me a picture of a 14, 15, or 16-year-old girl with the body of a grown woman, I don’t doubt my pupils will dilate. But it’s my judgment and moral compass that kicks in to tell me she is jailbait and off-limits. And it wouldn’t make me a pedo.

By: Khannea Suntzu

Khannea Suntzu — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 15:50:30 +0000

And then what? Send them to a concentration camp?

The one thing I like even less than a practicing pedosexual is a bully who thinks he or she knows what’s best for the world.

By: Khannea Suntzu

Khannea Suntzu — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 15:49:31 +0000

Omnivorous!

By: Bri

Bri — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 14:17:55 +0000

Yes, view the formation at any age. I could write enough to fill this web page, in relation to this. Human sexuality is central to our behavior.

By: GatorALLin

GatorALLin — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 12:32:23 +0000

Wondering if they can use this same research to aid them in catching pedophiles who claim not to be.