Elizabeth Latty

Research Interests

In a broad sense, my research interests lie in the broad category of sexual arousal and sexual orientation, along with those of my advisor. My first year project involved studying the sexual arousal patterns of post-operative male-to-female transsexuals. Our lab was able to use the results we obtained to further support results we found for natal women, as reported in our controversial combined study including work done by Meredith Chivers, Gerulf Rieger, Mike Bailey and myself.

Something more specific which interests me is WHY men and women respond differently to "nonpreferred" targets. In other words, why do straight women not get terribly offended like straight men seem to when someone of the same sex hits on them? Is there some innate mechanism that inhibits one sex from responding like the other? Along these lines, Mike and I have designed a study to investigate this idea. Acoustic startle response is a frequently used measurement of the emotional valence experienced by a subject in response to any stimulus in anxiety research. Startle is greater when the valence of the stimulus and the probe are similar and lesser when the valence of the stimulus and the probe oppose each other. When a subject is primed with an aversive stimulus, a sudden burst of noise results in a strong startle response; when a subject is primed with an appetitive stimulus, his startle response diminishes.
Since women have a bisexual response pattern to sexual stimuli, then we predict that they would show a decreased startle response when primed with any sexual stimuli, whereas men would show decreased startle response when primed with sexual stimuli representing their preferred target and increased startle when primed with sexual stimuli depicting their nonpreferred target. We will use acoustic startle probes to examine whether there is an effect of sex on magnitude of startle response when primed with various sexual stimuli, including gay, lesbian, and heterosexual depictions in still photographs. We hypothesize that men have some sort of built-in inhibitory mechanism that keeps them from responding positively to nonpreferred targets (i.e. keeps a straight guy from getting turned on to gay male sex acts).

In the future, I hope to concentrate more on women's sexual orientation. What causes women to be more fluid in their orientation and attraction? And, given the work already done in our lab on sexual arousal patterns and the resulting suggestion that women are not primarily motivated by sexual arousal when determining their sexual orientation, what ARE they motivated by?