Gesture Clues On Sexual Orientation Judgment Of Males:an Eye Movement Study

Sexual orientation is the preference towards another person, which is male orfemale, in mental or behavior. It includes heterosexuality, homosexuality,bisexuality and asexuality. Homosexuality had been studied most both in China andabroad. The studies in China about homosexual included the mental status, theformation and development of homosexuality, the attitude of the public towardshomosexual people and the psychological counseling and treatment of homosexualpeople. However, as the change of concept about homosexual people, the publicbegan to accept homosexual as a normal sexual minorities. Some adolescent evenbegan to imitate them, thus resulted in some tragedies in this younger group.Therefore, we need to put forward an effective evaluation method to identifypeople’s sexual orientation. In China, there had few study on judging sexualorientation of the others while the foreign scholar had been made lots of efforts.This study intended to find out the particular body regions and gestures while sexualorientation judgment on the previous related studies of the foreign country.In this study, the author used eye track method to evaluate the visual cues whenjudging the sexual orientation of the other people though talking and walking silentvideos. The study recruited4homosexual men and6heterosexual men to record thevideos. And there were10homosexual men and10heterosexual men recruited asrater. The results in this study were as follow:1both homosexual and heterosexual men could make accurate judgments onsilent video of talking and walking;2both kind of silent video could provide enough clues for the judgment ofsexual orientation;3people use the clues of head most when judging sexual orientation fromtalking video, and homosexual men would use clues from the area of legs, arms andupper body as well;4both homosexual and heterosexual men use the clues from the lower part ofthe body when judging sexual orientation from walking video.