Hockenbury Discovering Psychology 5th txtbk

338 CHAPTER 8 Motivation and EmotionI heard this on the news: “For everyolder brother a man has, the chancesof him being gay increase by onethird.”I got a few problems with thistheory. Specifically, Jimmy, Eddie, Billy,Tommy, Jay, Paul, and Peter. Those aremy older brothers—seven brothers. Bytheir math, I should be 233 percentgay. That’s getting up there.STEPHEN COLBERT—THE COLBERT REPORTSame-Sex Couples and Their ChildrenResearch on same-sex couples in committed,long-term relationships shows thattheir relationships are quite similar tothose of heterosexual couples in most ways(Balsam & others, 2008). One exception:Lesbian couples were better than heterosexualor gay couples at harmoniousproblem-solving (Roisman & others, 2008).What about their children?Research consistently hasshown that the children ofsame-sex parents are verysimilar to the children ofheterosexual parents(Patterson, 2006, 2008).And, contrary to popularbelief, teenagers withsame-sex parents havepeer relationships andfriendships that are verysimilar to those ofteenagers with heterosexualor single parents(Wainwright & Patterson,2008; Rivers & others,2008).(see Vilain, 2008). Beyond heredity, there is also evidence that sexual orientationmay be influenced by other biological factors, such as prenatal exposure to sex hormonesor other aspects of the prenatal environment.For example, one intriguing finding is that the more older brothers a man has,the more likely he is to be homosexual (Blanchard & Bogaert, 1996; Bogaert,2005b, 2003). Could a homosexual orientation be due to psychological factors,such as younger brothers being bullied or indulged by older male siblings? Or beingtreated differently by their parents, or some other family dynamics? No. Collectingdata on men who grew up in adoptive or blended families, Anthony Bogaert(2006) found that only the number of biologically related older brothers predictedhomosexual orientation. Living with older brothers who were not biologically relatedhad no effect at all. As Anthony Bogaert (2007) explains, “It’s not the brothersyou lived with; it’s the environment within the same womb—sharing the samemom.” Researchers don’t have an explanation for the effect, which has been replicatedin multiple studies (see Bogaert, 2007). One suggestion is that carrying successivemale children might trigger some sort of immune response in the motherthat, in turn, influences brain development in the male fetus.Finally, a number of researchers have discovered differences in brain function orstructure among gay, lesbian, and heterosexual men and women (e.g., LeVay, 2007;Savic & Lindström, 2008). However, most of these studies have proved small or inconclusive.It’s also important to note that there is no way of knowing whetherbrain differences are the cause or the effect of different patterns of sexual behavior.In general, the only conclusion we can draw from these studies is that somebiological factors are correlated with a homosexual orientation (Mustanski & others,2002). As we’ve stressed, correlation does not necessarily indicate causality, onlythat two factors seem to occur together. So stronger conclusions about the role ofgenetic and biological factors in determining sexual orientation await more definitiveresearch findings.In an early study involving in-depth interviews with over 1,000 gay men and lesbians,Alan Bell and his colleagues (1981) found that homosexuality was not theresult of disturbed or abnormal family relationships. They also found that sexual orientationwas determined before adolescence and long before the beginning of sexualactivity. Gay men and lesbians typically became aware of homosexual feelings aboutthree years before they engaged in any such sexual activity. In this regard, the patternwas very similar to that of heterosexual children, in whom heterosexual feelings arearoused long before the child expresses them in some form of sexual behavior.Several researchers now believe that sexual orientation is established as early asage 6 (Strickland, 1995). Do children who later grow up to be homosexuals differfrom children who later grow up to be heterosexuals? In at least one respect, thereseems to be a difference.Typically, boys and girls differ in theirchoice of toys, playmates, and activities fromearly childhood. However, evidence suggeststhat male and female homosexuals are lesslikely to have followed the typical pattern ofgender-specific behaviors in childhood (Bailey& others, 2000; Rieger & others, 2008).Compared to heterosexual men, gay men recallengaging in more cross-sex-typed behaviorduring childhood. For example, they rememberedplaying more with girls than withother boys, preferring girls’ toys over boys’toys, and disliking rough-and-tumble play.Lesbians are also more likely to recall crossgenderbehavior in childhood, but to a lesserdegree than gay men.