Implicit measurements of Lesbian and heterosexual women’s differential responses to gender figures

While heterosexual women have shown gender-nonspecific physiological and implicit responses (i.e., to both genders), Lesbian women have shown category-specific responses (i.e., only to their loved gender). Given the advantages of implicit over genital responses (non-invasive methods that capture subtler effects, and directly comparable across sexes), this study employed two implicit measures that had never been used to study women’s sexual orientations: the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP) and the Function Acquisition Speed Test. The advantage is that they are based on well-defined learning processes and the former allows to observe specific relations across genders and attraction attributes within the relational network. The present study recruited heterosexual and Lesbian women only. Across all relations, both implicit measures differentiated heterosexual and Lesbian participants, replicating the category-nonspecificity of the former group and the category-specificity of the latter. However, only the IRAP enabled the exploration of differences among four relations: male–attractive, male–unattractive, female–attractive, female–unattractive. Heterosexual participants demonstrated a positive bias to male figures in the first two relations, and no significant biases for female figures in the two last relations. While Lesbian participants showed category-specific biases coherent with their sexual orientation for all but the male-attractive relation, no particular bias emerged specifically in positively relating males with attractiveness (but a bias relating males with unattractiveness was observed). These results are discussed in light of previous IRAP research conducted with heterosexual and Gay men, the Differential Arbitrarily-Applicable Relational Responding Effects model, and other implicit measures with women.