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A new study published in scientific journal PLoS ONE suggests that pupil dilation is a reliable indicator of what turns a person on.
Eyes are said to be a window into a person's soul. But can they also be a window into a person's sexual orientation?
New research suggests that pupil dilation is a reliable indicator of what turns a person on.
When people see something they're attracted to, their pupils dilate as part of an unconscious arousal reaction, according to a study recently published in the scientific journal PLoS ONE.
"So if a man says he's straight, his eyes are dilating towards women. And the opposite with gay men, their eyes are dilating to men," researcher Ritch Savin-Williams, a developmental psychologist at Cornell University, told LiveScience.
This is the first large-scale experiment to demonstrate that pupil measurements are correlated to sexual orientation, according to the researcher.
Savin-Williams and Gerulf Rieger, also of Cornell University, used a gaze-tracking camera to examine the pupils of 165 men and 160 women, who varied in sexual orientation.
The volunteers watched minute-long videos of a man masturbating, a woman masturbating and neutral landscape scenes as the camera measured the changes in their pupil size, according to LiveScience.
The volunteers were also asked to report their own responses to each video.
Male reactions were fairly simple. Straight men's pupils dilated in response to erotic images of women while gay men's pupils dilated in response to erotic images of men.
Female responses, however, were a bit more complicated. Gay women's pupils dilated in response to images of other women. But straight women's pupils dilated equally for sexual images of both sexes.
Researchers have yet to discover an explanation for the difference.
Earlier studies have used genital measurements to research sexual orientation, but Savin-Williams says there are some limitations to that method.
The researcher said that results were often skewed because some people can control their genital arousal or cannot feel aroused in a laboratory.
"Some people just don't want to be involved in research that involves their genitals," Savin-Williams told LiveScience.
Rieger said that peoples' hesitation to genital research is what prompted him and Savin-Williams to turn to pupil measurements.
"We wanted to find an alternative measure that would be an automatic indication of sexual orientation, but without being as invasive as previous measures. Pupillary responses are exactly that," Rieger said.
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