Kinsey concluded that homosexuality and heterosexuality were distributed dimensionally in the normal population, a significant percentage of whom experienced homosexual feelings. This conclusion has been ignored by most sex researchers. Twenty men seeking treatment for compulsive sexual behaviours reported a dimensional distribution of heterosexual and homosexual feelings, rated by questionnaire on 11-point scales. Their penile volume responses to 10-second movies of nude women and men were assessed. Significant correlations were found between individual subjects' penile volume and questionnaire assessment of heterosexual/homosexual feelings, validating their questionnaire-assessed dimensional distribution of their feelings. The finding was considered to provide the initial stage of physiological validation of the questionnaire, which in previous studies demonstrated a dimensional distribution of heterosexual/homosexual feelings in representative samples of medical students, supporting Kinsey's conclusion.

Adolescent↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Active and passive attention in schizophrenia: an ERP study of information processing in a linguistic task.

Attentional dysfunctions in schizophrenia were investigated using a sentence priming task. Schizophrenic patients and healthy control subjects were presented with sentences to which they were required to make a response based on either semantic or physical stimulus features. Schizophrenics' behavioural responses were slower than those of controls, particularly when attending to semantic relationships, but their performance was no less accurate. Both the P300 and the N400 components of the event-related potentials (ERPs) recorded to the sentence completions were attenuated in the schizophrenic sample. The results are interpreted in terms of a deficit in the active maintenance of semantic information in memory and the integration of new information with this representation.

Adult↗