The Impact Of Gender Threats On College Students’ Homosexual Attitudes:the Role Of Asserting Heterosexuality

Homosexuality is a general pattern of behavior that prevails in human history and in various cultures.Scholars are becoming more and more concerned about the public’s understanding and attitude towards homosexuality.The current research mainly focuses on the analysis of the overall characteristics of public attitudes and the differences of attitudes in some factors.Studies have found that gender threat may also be a factor influencing college students’ attitudes towards homosexuality.In addition,homosexuality is divided into four different types according to gender and gender typicality,and people may have different attitudes toward it.However,there is a lack of attitude measurement on the four different homosexuality in China,and few studies have explored the impact of differences in homosexual attitudes from both the gender threat and homosexuality itself.Based on existing research,this study adds gender threat,not only to explore the impact of gender threat on college students’ attitudes towards homosexuality,but also to examine the role of asserting heterosexuality and skeletal muscle content in this impact.Experimental method was adopted in this study,including three experiments:Experiment 1 recruited 148 college students,using homosexual faces as experimental materials,and using 2 subjects gender(male,female)× 2 threat conditions(gender threat group,gender affirmation group)× 4 homosexual type(masculine gay man,effeminate gay man,masculine lesbian,effeminate lesbian)to explore the influence of gender threat on college students’ towards homosexuality.In the second experiment,94 male college students were recruited as subjects,and the within-subjects design of2 asserting heterosexuality conditions(with and without asserting)was used to explore whether the opportunity to reaffirm masculinity(asserting heterosexuality)can eliminate negative impact by gender threat.Experiment 3 recruited 84 male college students.and the within-subjects design of 2 skeletal muscle content(high skeletal muscle content group and low skeletal muscle content group)was used to further explore which types of males are more susceptible to gender threat.The conclusions are as follows:1.The gender threat selectively increased the subjects’ discomfort,and there is no difference in the negative emotional experience between the gender threat group and gender affirmation group.2.College students’ attitude towards effeminate lesbian is more positive than that of masculine gay man,masculine lesbian,and effeminate gay man.3.Men who are threatened by gender roles are more negative about homosexuality than men in gender affirmation group;women are not affected by gender threat.4.In the gender threat group,female college students’ attitude towards homosexuality are more active than male college students;in the gender affirmation group,there is no significant difference in attitudes toward homosexuality between male college students and female college students.5.Under the condition of gender threat,the asserting heterosexuality group has a more positive attitude towards gay man and homosexuality than the no affirming group,and there is no significant difference in attitude towards lesbian between the two group.6.Under the condition of gender threat,the high skeletal muscle group had more discomfort than the low skeletal muscle group,but there is no difference of discomfort and attitude towards homosexuality between the two groups.