Implicit and Explicit Measures of Sexual Orientation: Consequences of Implicit-Explicit Ambivalence.

(Or: You might not be as straight as you think you are, and it's making you sick.)

Attitudes serve a number of important functions (Katz, 1960) - they help us to navigate the world, seek out rewards, avoid punishment, etc. Having strong, easily accessible attitudes actually contributes to physiological health (Fazio & Powell, 1997).  However, attitudes can also be quite complex:  individuals who hold evaluatively inconsistent beliefs toward a single object are said to be ambivalent.  For example, one may believe that abortion is both necessary and morally wrong.  If strong, accessible attitudes promote health, it follows that attitudinal ambivalence might undermine health, or daily functioning.  Indeed, individuals who are ambivalent regarding certain personality traits (e.g., high extraversion, low need for affiliation) experience more disrupted marriage, more intimacy low points, and more relationship dissatisfaction (Winter et al., 1998). One area in which attitude ambivalence might be particularly important is sexual orientation. Individuals who have a clear , strong, easily accessible sexual orientation ought to be generally healthier than those who do not.. In a related vein, individuals who show ambivalence regarding gender identity experience less positive, and more negative affect (Robinson et al., 2001).  Psychologists formerly referred to sexually ambivalent individuals as "ego-dystonic homosexuals," and counted them among those who may require clinical treatment. One obvious difficulty with assessing sexual preference is that homosexuality is generally socially undesirable, and individuals may be unwilling and/or unable to admit their homosexuality to others or themselves - "closeted," or "repressed" homosexuals, respectively, in the vernacular.  Recent advances in research on attitude measurement have uncovered techniques for obviating "willing and able" problems in assessing attitudes toward socially undesirable topics (e.g., racial prejudice; Fazio et al., 1995).  These new measures are called implicit attitude measures (Greenwald et al., 1998), in contrast to traditional explicit (self-report) attitude measures.  The present research aims to assess sexual preference using both explicit and implicit measures, and to use implicit-explicit ambivalence regarding sexual preference to predict a variety of health-related outcomes (e.g., positive and negative affect, health complaints, visits to health center, school performance, etc.).  This line of research has the potential to enhance our understanding of sexual preference, implicit and explicit attitudes, attitude ambivalence, and to identify potentially at-risk individuals.