The Use of Film Clips in a Viewing Time Task of Sexual Interests.

Viewing time tasks using still pictures to assess age and gender sexual interests have been well validated and are commonly used. The use of film clips in a viewing time task would open up interesting possibilities for the study of sexual interest toward sexual targets or activities that are not easily captured in still pictures. We examined the validity of a viewing time task using film clips to assess sexual interest toward male and female targets, in a sample of 52 young adults. Film clips produced longer viewing times than still pictures. For both men and women, the indices derived from the film viewing time task were able to distinguish individuals who identified as homosexual (14 men, 8 women) from those who identified as heterosexual (15 men, 15 women), and provided comparable group differentiation as indices derived from a viewing time task using still pictures. Men's viewing times were more gender-specific than those of women. Viewing times to film clips were correlated with participants' ratings of sexual appeal of the same clips, and with viewing times to pictures. The results support the feasibility of a viewing time measure of sexual interest that utilizes film clips and, thus, expand the types of sexual interests that could be investigated (e.g., sadism, biastophilia).

Viewing time as a measure of bisexual sexual interest.

Studies of bisexual sexual interest have focused mostly on measures of genital arousal in bisexual men and have generally failed to find evidence of a bisexual pattern of genital arousal. Bisexual women have rarely been studied and other measures of sexual interest have not been used to study bisexual interest in either sex. In this study, we examined a non-genital measure of sexual interest, viewing time, among 16 bisexual men, 19 bisexual women, 15 heterosexual men, 15 heterosexual women, 15 homosexual men, and 10 homosexual women. Sexual orientation was determined from a self-report questionnaire. Stimuli were pictures of males and females of all five Tanner stages of sexual development. Participants were asked to rate the sexual appeal of the individuals depicted in the pictures, while the time taken to provide a response was covertly measured. Using a signed index that compared viewing times to pictures of sexually mature males and females, bisexual men and bisexual women did not look longer at pictures of one gender, whereas the other four groups had longer viewing times for pictures of one gender. Using an absolute index, the three groups of women showed a similar (and low) degree of gender preference. All groups showed longer viewing times for sexually mature individuals than for sexually immature individuals, suggesting that the viewing time responses of bisexual men and women were not produced by a general tendency to look indiscriminately at all pictures. There were small to moderate correlations between viewing times and rated sexual appeal in all groups. Results suggest that viewing time can be used to detect a bisexual pattern of sexual interest in bisexual men and bisexual women.