All right, everyone. Now we're going to talk about motivation and emotion. So first, let's talk about some motivational theories. And I want to introduce you all to this gentleman. This gentleman's name is Aaron Ralston.
And if you've seen the movie 127 Hours, you'll know that he was a rock climber that liked to go solo. And so here he is probably at one of his most stressful moments of his life where he got trapped between a rock while he was climbing. hadn't told anyone where he was going and was climbing alone.
So he was trapped for almost a week for six days and if any of you have seen the movie you know this but if you haven't seen the movie which is based on this true story, Aaron Ralston survived this rock climbing accident by cutting his own arm off. Which seems like a lie or made up, but is what actually happened. This is actually an image of the real person, not from the movie, that he took while he was trapped because he had some of his gear with him.
them and I guess I always want to start with this particular clip because I want you to reflect on this idea of what motivates someone someone to cut their own arm off? And could you do it in order to survive? His option was to remain trapped there and probably die of dehydration. He was very close after six days in a hot climate.
That his options were stay there and die. No one knew where he was. He was obviously trapped down in a canyon where no one could see him. And it was very unlikely anyone was going to find him. Before he died of dehydration, which you can die of dehydration in as little as three days.
Where he was located, like I said, he had some of his gear, so he had some food and water with him, but that ran out. And actually what motivated him, according to his own experience, was that he began having hallucinations, which is common when you're dehydrated. And one of the hallucinations that he had was of his future son. And he said that is what spurred him to have the will to live, to do anything to survive, even cut his own arm off. So I think it's worth thinking about what motivates people to survive.
Let's look at a few more examples of behavior and try to decide why we think individuals are doing these things. So first, let's talk about Frank. So Frank gets in an argument with his girlfriend and is very upset.
He gets in his car and goes for a long drive in an attempt to think and clear my head. So I think it's important for us to think about this behavior. So underline to have goes for a long drive. Well, why might you go for a long drive? Well, maybe the nearest grocery store is far away.
So you'd have to go for a long drive if you lived in a rural area. Maybe you had to go for a long drive to get to the nearest hospital. But in this case, those things don't seem to be motivating Frank. Frank. is reported to have gotten in an argument and be very upset.
So why would he go for a long drive? Well, he could need to process his emotions. It says, clear my head.
Often people will try to take a break when they're upset to gather their thoughts so they don't say something mean or something they'll regret, right? Perhaps they feel like they need to avoid their partner for a bit. And so all those reasons. We can see how the exact same behavior can lead, can come from very different sort of motivating factors. Let's look at the next one.
After his human leaves for work, Bob the dog gets up and goes to the toilet bowl where he takes a long drink of water. So here I've underlined, he takes a long drink of water. What could be motivating Bob the dog to take a long drink of water?
Well, it could be that he's very thirsty. But notice that I said that he waits until after his human leaves for work before going to the toilet bowl to drink water. Most dogs are scolded when they drink from the toilet bowl because humans think it's gross, it's nasty, there's germs in there. So often dogs will want to drink from it.
Probably it has very interesting smells, not to us, but perhaps to them. And so by drinking after the human leaves... This dog may be less likely to get scolded, right?
So that could be a motivating factor for why that organism is taking that behavior at that time. Next we have Dan and Jean and I want us to listen to both of them and then consider why we think they might be doing their behaviors. Dan can't wait to get into the airplane.
After checking and double checking his chute, he is finally ready to go. The plane climbs to the necessary height and he jumps from the plane while gleefully screaming. Okay, that's Dan. Let's talk about Jean.
Jean carefully packs her chute and supplies. She is making her first jump in active combat since becoming a member of the paratroopers. She knows she has to go through with it. To turn back now would be detrimental to her career. The plane climbs to the necessary height and she gets in line with her squadron members.
Her turn is up and she jumps from the plane while thinking about what will face her on the ground. So in each of these cases, if we look at the underlined behavior, jumps from a plane, it's the same behavior, jumping out of a plane with a parachute on, right? In Dan's case, it seems like what's motivating him maybe is seeking an adrenaline rush, the joy of the wind on his face, so some positive emotion. Whereas for Jean, jumping from the plane is about avoiding consequence, potentially losing their job or losing... the respect of her colleagues, or for the military purposes, if you leave your orders, you can be court-martialed or anything else.
And so we see very different motivating factors, right? And so in this chapter, we're going to talk a lot about what motivates human behavior. So let's talk about it. Because, and just like we talked about in the behaviorism chapter and learning theory chapter, right?
The same behavior could be motivated by very different things. So we're going to break this down a little bit. We're going to talk about physiological needs, social needs, and arousal or cognitive needs. So physical needs are things like food, water, having a moderate and safe temperature.
Social needs are things like belongingness or affection. And arousal or cognitive needs are needs for learning and growth and challenge. And we're going to talk about several theories that underlie why we think people seek to act at different points in time. So if we wanted to define motivation, we might think of this as goal-directed behaviors. So motives are needs, wants, interests, and desires that propel people in certain directions.
In short, motivation involves goal-directed behavior. Psychologists have devised a number of theoretical approaches to motivation. So we're going to talk about some of these theories.
Many theories view motivational forces in terms of drives. So the concept of a drive was derived from Walter Cannon's observation that organisms seek to maintain homeostasis, which is a state of physiological equilibrium or stability. Drive theories apply the concept of homeostasis to behavior. A drive is a hypothetical internal state of tension that motivates an organism to engage in activities that should reduce this tension. These unpleasant states of tension are viewed as disruptions of the preferred equilibrium.
According to drive theories, when individuals experience a drive, they're motivated to pursue actions that will lead to drive reduction. Drive theories have been very influential. And the drive concept continues to be widely used in modern psychology. However, drive theories cannot explain all motivation. All right, let's switch over to incentive theories.
Incentive theories propose that external stimuli regulate motivational states. So an incentive is an external goal that has the capacity to motivate behavior. And we see this come into play when we talk about sort of the ideas of reinforcement or punishment as we discussed in the learning theories chapter. Drive and incentive models are often contrasted as push versus pull theories. Drive theories emphasize how internal states of tension push people in certain directions, while incentive theories emphasize how external stimuli can pull people in certain directions.
According to drive theories, the source of motivation lies within the organism, while according to incentive theories, the source of motivation lies within the organism. The source of motivation lies outside the organism, in the environment. Thus, incentive models emphasize the role of environmental factors rather than the principle of homeostasis. Alright, finally let's talk about evolutionary theories.
So, psychologists who take an evolutionary perspective assert that the motives of humans and other species are the products of evolution, just as anatomical characteristics are. They argue that natural selection favors behaviors that maximize reproductive success. That is, passing on genes to the next generation.
Thus, they explain the motives such as affiliation, achievement, dominance, aggression, and sex drive in terms of their adaptive value. Evolutionary analyses of motivation are based on the premise that motives can be best understood in terms of the adaptive problems they have solved over the course of human history. Alright, let's talk a little bit about motivation and the motivation of hunger and eating. So let's talk about the biological factors in the regulation of hunger.
So today scientists believe that two areas of the hypothalamus, the arcuate nucleus and the paraventricular nucleus, play a large role in the modulation of hunger. Contemporary theories of hunger focus more on neural circuits that pass through areas of the hypothalamus rather than on anatomical centers of the brain. These circuits depend on a large variety of neurotransmitters and they appear to be much more complicated than anticipated. Evidence suggests that the neural circuits regulating hunger are massively and reciprocally interconnected with extensive parallel processing.
The digestive system includes a variety of mechanisms that influence hunger. After you have consumed food, the stomach can send a variety of signals to the brain that inhibit further eating. For instance, the vagus nerve carries information about the stretching of the stomach walls that indicate when the stomach is empty.
stomach is full. Other nerves carry satiety messages that depend on how rich in nutrients the contents of the stomach are. A variety of hormones circulating in the bloodstream appear to contribute to the regulation of hunger. For example, after the body goes without food for a while, the stomach secretes ghrelin, which causes the stomach to contract. contractions and promotes hunger.
In contrast, after food is consumed, the upper intestines release a hormone called CCK that delivers satiety signals to the brain, thus reducing hunger. Evidence indicates that the brain is able to that a hormone called leptin contributes to the long-term regulation of hunger, as well as the regulation of numerous other bodily functions. Leptin is produced by fat cells throughout the body and is released into the bloodstream.
Leptin circulates through the bloodstream and ultimately provides the hypothalamus with information about the body's fat stores. So ghrelin causes stomach contractions and promotes hunger. CCK delivers satiety signals and reduces hunger.
And leptin contributes to the long-term regulation of hunger and is stored in fat cells. Most of the research on the physiological regulation of hunger has been based on the assumption that hunger operates as a drive system, in which homeostatic mechanisms are at work. However, some theorists emphasize the incentive value of food.
They argue that humans and other animals are often motivated to eat not by the need to compensate for energy deficits, but by the anticipated pleasure of eating. This perspective has been bolstered by evidence that a variety of environmental variables exert significant influence over food consumption. Let's talk about some of those now.
So first let's talk about palatability. As you might expect, the better the food tastes, the more of it people consume. And this principle is not limited only to humans.
There's some interesting work around the quantity also. So quantity available. A powerful determinant of the amount eaten is the amount available. People tend to consume what is put in front of them. The more food people are served, the more they eat.
Likewise with variety. Humans and animals increase their consumption when a greater variety of foods are available. As you eat a specific food, its incentive value declines. You get satiated.
You get enough. of it. This phenomenon is called sensory specific satiety.
If only a few foods are available, the appeal of all of them can decline quickly. But if many foods are available, people can keep shifting to new foods and end up eating more overall. This is really interesting when you think about things like buffets, which have fallen in popularity in recent years, but when I was younger, I feel like they were very common.
You wind up eating a lot more buffets. There's more food available. buffet, you can have as much as you like. And there's a ton of variety of food. So people keep eating.
Another factor that influences food consumption is the presence of others. So on average, individuals eat 44% more when they eat with other people as opposed to eating alone. The more people present, the more food people tend to eat. I think what's interesting about a lot of these and we're going to talk about a couple more is i think that we can see that these are present in um large gatherings think thanksgiving christmas right so a large variety of food presence of others of you know if you've ever had a holiday meal in your family there's probably a large variety of foods everyone's bringing something and you know with holidays they're all bringing something really tasty um A couple of other factors that we see coming into play include stress and exposure to food cues.
So stress has a varied effect on eating as some individuals eat less, but estimates suggest that roughly 40 to 50 percent of people increase their food consumption in times of stress. In many people, stress appears to also foster a shift toward less healthy food choices, such as loading up on sweets and fatty foods. And the final example is exposure to food cues.
So eating can be triggered by exposure to cues that have been associated with food. Studies have shown that exposure to food advertisements incite hunger and lead to increased food intake. Unfortunately, the mere sight or smell of tasty food can lead people to think of how pleasurable it would be to consume that food and undermine their willpower. So, um... We know that seeing commercials on television will make you want the thing that you're seeing, right?
That's what they're designed to do. For example, I may not crave Doritos for a long time, and then I see a Doritos commercial, and I want Doritos. Or Taco Bell.
I never want Taco Bell, but I see a commercial for Taco Bell, and I'm like, oh yeah, I think I want Taco Bell, right? Exposure to food cues. Definitely sights and smells, right? So if you walk into somewhere, and you hadn't really been thinking about food, and you smell something smelling really good, You're going to want it. You're going to crave it.
So this really illustrates the idea that human eating is definitely not influenced only by sort of these drives to eat to survive, right? This is definitely conveying that people eat at times other than when they're just trying to survive, right? They eat for pleasure.
They eat for social company. And so drive theories really don't accurately sort of sum up what drives us to eat, right? Because if that were the case, no one would overeat.
If it were the case that humans were only eating to just survive and get the calories they need to keep moving, then they'd never overeat. All these factors are examples of... of the fact that drive theories are insufficient to explain why people eat or overeat.
All right, let's talk a little bit about learned preferences and habits in relation to eating. So people from different cultures display very different patterns of food consumption. And taste preferences are partly a function of learned associations formed through classical conditioning. For instance, youngsters can be conditioned to prefer flavors paired with pleasant events. So for example, in many cultures, they do not like peanut butter.
And if you are a kid who grew up in the United States, peanut butter is a very common food. It's a very common food of childhood, unless you have an allergy. Most families eat peanut butter.
And it's considered a good food that children like, right? Whereas in other cultures, the consistency of peanut butter is considered very odd and strange in some East Asian cultures. And so it's so interesting because we really do learn to enjoy the... things that our culture eats. For example, in Korean culture, kimchi is a very common food, right?
It's fermented cabbage and other vegetables, and it's spicy. And folks that grew up eating that associated with childhood in the same way that I associate peanut butter with childhood, right? And so it's very easy to prefer some things over others, whereas, you know, what may be eaten in another culture would be very jarring too.
a given culture if that's not what you grew up eating. Likewise, taste aversions can also be acquired through conditioning, as we talked about before. So eating habits are also shaped by observational learning.
To a large degree, food preferences are a matter of exposure. People generally prefer familiar foods. Geographical, cultural, religious, and ethnic factors limit people's accessibility to certain foods. But repeated exposure to a new food usually leads to increased liking. However, as many parents have learned the hard way, forcing a child to eat a specific food can backfire and have a negative effect on youngsters'preferences for the required food.
Another one that I think is a good example is in Louisiana, we eat a dish called crawfish, which are little, they look like miniature lobsters. And it's a very common dish here. But if someone were not familiar with that, they might think that they just look like insects, right? But it's a very common food here that is much beloved because it's associated with family crawfish boils when you were growing up, you know? All right.
Let's talk a little bit about eating and weight and the roots of obesity. So as we've discussed, hunger is regulated by a complex interaction of biological... biological and physiological factors, as well as psychological factors.
The same kind of complexities emerge when investigators explore the roots of obesity, which is the condition of being overweight. Most experts assess obesity in terms of body mass index, which is weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared. This index of weight controls for variations in height. A BMI of 25 to 29.9 is typically regarded as overweight, and a BMI over 30 is generally considered obese. Studies show a surprisingly sharp increase in the incidence of obesity in recent decades.
I do want to call something out right now, even though we're learning about this now. I just want to call out the fact that the BMI scale was designed with very Eurocentric body types in mind. And so I'm not saying that this is the be all or end all or that this is absolutely correct.
There's certainly more research that is needed. But we are going to talk about it a little bit so we can understand how it operates in relation to health, right? Which is not a direct correlation as sort of a Eurocentric view of body mass index may propose, right?
It's not that simple, but let's talk about it. So obesity is considered a big health problem because it elevates one's mortality risk. So obese individuals are more vulnerable than others to coronary disease, stroke, hypertension, diabetes, respiratory problems, gallbladder disease, arthritis, muscle and skeletal pain, sleep apnea, and some types of cancer.
Moreover, recent evidence suggests that obesity may foster inflammatory and metabolic changes such as that contribute to the development of Alzheimer's disease. Research suggests that obesity is partly a matter of hereditary influence. In an influential twin study, researchers found that identical twins reared apart were far more similar in BMI than fraternal twins reared together.
In another study of over 4,000 twins, researchers estimated that genetic factors account for 61% of the variation in weight among men, and 73 among women the bottom line for overweight folks is that in general this isn't perfect they may be eating too much in relation to their level of exercise so calories in versus calories out in modern america there is a tendency to overeat and exercise too little there are a lot of high calorie high fat foods and sugar sweetened drinks that are readily available and today americans spend almost one half of their food dollars in restaurants where they tend to eat more than they typically consume at home unhealthy foods are heavily advertised and these marketing efforts are very effective in getting people to increase their consumption of such foods. Modern societies are thought to create a toxic obesogenic environment for eating. Unfortunately the rise of this obesogenic environment has been paralleled by a significant decline in physical activity. Modern conveniences such as cars and elevators and changes in the world of work such as the shift to more desk jobs and increase in TV viewing and video games have conspired to make American lifestyles more sedentary than ever before. Sleep deprivation, which we talked about earlier in this semester, has definitely increased in modern societies in recent decades and is another factor that's thought to contribute to obesity.
Sleep seems to be linked with weight regulation, and insufficient rest has been associated with weight gain. Sleep deprivation appears to alter the hormonal balances involved in regulating appetite, eating, and satiety. People who lose weight on a diet have a rather strong tendency to gain back all the weight they lose, suggesting that homeostatic mechanisms may defend against weight loss.
It appears that a constellation of metabolic and neuroendocrine processes work to resist weight loss. Interestingly, the human body is also wired to resist weight gain. People who have to work to put on weight often have trouble keeping it on. The adaptive mechanism that tend to maintain a fairly stable body weight suggests that everyone may have a set point for weight. The set point is each individual's natural point of stability for weight.
Originally viewed as a specific point of balance, it is now viewed as a narrow range of weight around that point. All right, let's talk a little bit about sexual motivation and behavior. So Masters and Johnson are the big names in talking about the human sexual response, and they divided the sexual response cycle into four stages.
Excitement, plateau, organism, During the excitement phase, the level of physical arousal usually escalates rapidly. In both genders, muscle tension, respiration rate, heart rate, and blood pressure increase over time. quickly. Vasocongestion, which is engorgement of blood vessels, produces penile erection in swollen testes in males.
In females, vasocongestion leads to a swelling and hardening of the clitoris, expansion of the vaginal lips, and vaginal lubrication. During the plateau phase, physiological arousal continues to build, but at a much slower pace. When foreplay is lengthy, arousal tends to fluctuate in both genders.
Orgasm occurs when sexual arousal reaches its peak. intensity and is discharged in a series of muscular contractions that pulsate through the pelvic area. The subjective experience of orgasm is very similar for men and women, but women are more likely than men to experience more than one orgasm in a brief period of time.
That said, women are also more likely than men to engage in intercourse without experiencing an orgasm. During the resolution phase, the physiological changes produced by sexual arousal gradually subside. If orgasm has not occurred, the reduction in sexual tension may be relatively slow.
After orgasm, men experience a refractory period, which is a time following orgasm during which they are largely unresponsive to further stimulation. The large refractory period varies from a few minutes to a few hours and increases with age. So let's talk about an evolutionary theory related to sexual attraction.
And I want to be really clear that this theory is very heterogeneous. Now I'm going to share it because it's a really famous theory in psychology, but I also want to really acknowledge that this is one of those times that really clearly indicates psychology's failure to be as inclusive as it should be. So let's talk about the parental investment theory generally in a very binary and gender heteronormative way, understanding that that is problematic. And I look forward to future researchers, potentially even some of our own students, expanding these ideas substantially. All right.
So parental investment refers to what each Sex has to invest in times of energy, survival risk, and foregone opportunities, like to pursue other goals, in order to produce and nurture offspring. In most species, striking discrepancies exist between males and females and their parental investment. And these discrepancies shape mating strategies. As with many mammalian species, human males are required to invest little in the production of offspring beyond the act of copulation.
Hence, their reproductive potential is maximized by mating with as many females as possible. The situation for females is quite different. Females have to invest nine months in pregnancy and our female ancestors typically had to devote at least several additional years to nourishing offspring through breastfeeding. These realities place a ceiling on the number of offspring women can produce, regardless of how many males they mate with. Hence, Females have little or no incentive for mating with many males.
Instead, females can optimize their reproductive potential by being selective in mating. Parental investment theory predicts that in comparison with women, men will show more interest in sexual activity, more desire for a variety of sexual partners, and more willingness to engage in uncommitted sex. In contrast, females are thought to be conservative and highly selective in choosing partners. Selectivity supposedly involves seeking partners who have the greatest ability to contribute towards feeding and caring for offspring.
So the theory here with parental investment theory is that the behaviors that we see between males and females in terms of mate choice and behaviors around mating have to do with the reproductive effort that each has to... engage in. So the idea that males will have many partners because, and they're looking for youth and attractiveness because of reproductive suitability, whereas females are looking for income and status and ambition because it takes a lot of effort to raise a partner and they want stability and they want income.
Now I want you guys to really think about this for a second because I think that if you, if you put your head to it long enough, you'll see that there are other explanations for this, right? And I think it's pretty clear what those other explanations are, right? So part of this may be some of this evolutionary pressure, right? But part of it is probably that in any given culture, certain expectations or societal pressures are placed on folks that lead to their behaviors, right? So if a society is extremely obsessed with purity, the idea of purity in women, then they would lose a lot of social status and a lot of opportunity by engaging in what is considered promiscuous behavior.
But there are indigenous cultures that are matrilineal instead of patrilineal, patriarchal, right? In which... Females are encouraged to engage with many partners prior to when they partner up and have a child.
And so and that is part of their culture. So this idea that it is based on sort of the biological reality is probably one of these instances where assumptions are being made about societal realities. And they're...
going backwards. This is one of the challenges with evolutionary theories, right? Is they work from what is currently existing in terms of social and behavioral reality about how people interact.
And they're assuming things about how things played out in evolutionary history. Now they do apply this theory to other organisms beyond humans, obviously. So they look at how birds reproduce or cattle or etc. Right? And so They pull the evidence of how those organisms behave, the sort of non-human organisms.
But I think it's important to realize that this even changed with the advent of birth control for women, right? And so this idea that this is fundamentally evolutionary or biological in nature may actually be more about social interaction, social standing, and how people interact in human societies. Maybe more so than...
biologically or evolutionarily. All right, now let's talk a little bit about this research that's been done relative to the... parental investment theory. So consistent with evolutionary theory, males generally have reported greater interest in sex than females.
Men report thinking about sex more often than women, initiate sex more often, and have more frequent and varied sexual fantasies. Findings in one study suggest that this disparity in sexual motivation only widens when people reach middle age. And Men are more motivated than women to pursue sex with a greater variety of partners, so there is some clear disparity there. I think it's important to note, however, that, again, to what extent does societal pressures play into this, right?
And that can be hard to tell. All right, let's talk a little bit about sexual orientation, and we're going to talk about some of the theories of sexual orientation. So, sexual orientation is a person's preference for emotional and sexual relationships with individuals of the same sex, the other sex, either sex, or in a more progressive way, we can also talk about pansexual where folks are not really interested as much on the gender binary and I fully acknowledge that there's a problematic focus on the binary in some of this early research in psychology again.
always looking to be better in the future. But a lot of the early research focused on this idea of heterosexual versus homosexual versus bisexual. So heterosexual folks are people who seek emotional sexual relationships with members of the opposite sex. Bisexual would be people who seek emotional sexual relationships with members of either sex.
homosexuals would be people who seek emotional sexual relationships with people of the same sex and the big researcher around um sort of sexual behavior and sexual attraction was uh alfred kinsey there's been several movies about kinsey and there's still an institute that studies this called the kinsey institute and so one of the interesting things because this was in the 60s i believe when they were doing this work Is that at the time there was a lot of repression and sort of discomfort around talking about sex. But they got people through interviews to discuss their sexual attractions, fantasies, prior experiences. And prior to Kinsey, who really talked about sexuality on a spectrum. That it's not either or. That most people fall somewhere in the middle.
It was believed that everybody was either straight or gay, and obviously homosexuality was rarely discussed. But more and more and more, the research has revealed that there really is a lot of... gray is not the wrong not the right word there's a lot more people again in the middle on this continuum um and a lot more people have engaged in you know um non-heterosexual experiences in a way that prior to kinsey's research just wasn't even considered as a possibility right and now we know in our sort of more modern era we're even shifting away from this being you know when i was in in school when I was in K-12, this was the big deal, right? People coming out and coming out is still a big deal. Let me be clear.
It's a big emotional deal because there's still family structures and things about religious upbringings that can be hard around coming out as homosexual. But what's really interesting is now we're seeing the advent of, you know, transgender identity, non-binary identities, people who report being asexual, so not having really romantic attraction or desire for romantic attraction to anyone. There are people who engage in sort of open relationships, right?
So non-monogamous is a big thing now. And so this is just continuing to expand in probably what's been going on all along. But people are finally being able to put words to their experience.
And so I always want to be sensitive that this binary idea is really problematic. And it gets even more problematic. So let's talk about it. So there were some prior theories of... sexuality coming out of psychology.
In fact, homosexuality was at one point many, many, many years ago, but it was actually listed in the DSM as a disorder in the 50s. And I know that is deeply problematic. Let me be really clear about that.
But psychology's got kind of a assorted history with its involvement with negative interactions with... with that community. So let's talk about some of these early theories which are deeply problematic.
So both psychoanalysts and behaviorists had theories that proposed environmental explanations for the development of homosexuality. So Freudian theorists argued that a male is more likely to become gay when raised by a weak, detached, ineffectual father who is a poor heterosexual role model and by an overprotective, overly attached mother with whom the boy identifies. There was a lot of gender role stuff in early psychoanalytic theory.
Behavioral theorists on the other hand argued that homosexuality was a learned preference acquired when same-sex stimuli were paired with sexual arousal, perhaps through a chance deduction by adult homosexuals. So let me be really clear about something. Let me be crystal clear.
I don't know how to say it more clear. It is. Theories have been confirmed to have no support.
Both of them are deeply problematic ways to view homosexuality and just, just bad. Just bad. Because the psychoanalytic theory implies that becoming homosexual was somehow a failing on the part of parent to be good models of how to be a man as if someone who was homosexuality.
uh homosexual couldn't be a good man because that was the way it was often thought of it was often not even considered that women would be uh homosexual in these early days and that's just absolute utter nonsense right and then behavioral theories um suggesting that essentially people would become gay because they were seduced by older individuals that were already gay is deeply problematic and definitely sort of paints homosexuality as a deviance as almost like a paraphilia which is a sexual sort of like fetish vibe to it and that is so bad and it it really is bad sometimes when we realize the ways in which psychology has been party to othering individuals in the lgbtqia community um We are definitely moving away from that now. In fact, any psychologists thought to be associated with any attempts to alter individuals who report homosexual identity. There used to be these terrible camps where they tried to force people not to be gay. Any association with one of those will get your license revoked. in every state in the U.S.
And because we know as psychologists how damaging that is to deny people's identity. So I like to be really clear that even though some of these terrible theories came out of psychology, all of the research suggests that they are not correct. They are not true.
And so... Most individuals who report homosexual feelings identify that they had those feelings from a very young age. You know, people will often say, well, I knew I was gay when I was five years old.
I didn't know what to call it, but I knew, you know, I knew how I felt. Most also initially report that they struggle to share their identity. And we think that this may be mainly due to...
worry or fear of being ostracized within one's community or social repercussions. And so we know that that happens. So let's talk about this a little more. So there have been some biological theories of homosexuality. So there was some research in the 90s that suggested that gay men who had a twin brother or adopted brother They found that 52% of the participants'twin brothers, identical twin brothers, were gay, while 22% of their fraternal twins were gay and 11% of their adoptive brothers were gay.
A companion study of lesbians yielded similar patterns of results. Given that identical twins share more genetic overlap than fraternal twins, who share more genes than unrelated adoptive siblings, these results suggest a genetic predisposition to homosexuality. The heritability of sexual orientation appears to be similar in men and women. So many theorists suspect that the roots of homosexuality may lie in the organizing effects of prenatal hormones or neurological development. Several lines of research suggest that hormonal secretions during critical periods of prenatal development may shape sexual development, organizing the brain in a lasting manner, and influencing subsequent sexual orientation.
Despite all this research, there's a lot that we still need to learn about the determinants of sexual orientation. One complication that has emerged is that the pathways to homosexuality may be different for males and females. And female sexuality appears to be characterized by more plasticity than male sexuality. In other words, women's sexual behavior is thought to be more easily shaped and modified by social cultural factors.
But I like to note that there may be more permission in our society for women to have more fluid sexual behavior than men. There's a really... strong, toxic masculinity sort of culture in the United States that may be almost invisible if you live in this culture to realize just how intensely homophobic and toxic a lot of the patriarchal American culture is. It's extremely controlling of women's bodies and extremely reinforcing a sort of dominant patriarchal power structures as well.
All right, so we'll stop there and pick up.