Despite ongoing changes in the national sociopolitical landscape, negative attitudes toward non-heterosexuals continue to permeate throughout our society. Not only is sexual prejudice still prevalent, but experiencing it can have severe and far-reaching effects on LGBT individuals’ mental and physical health. Additionally, previous research has consistently found sexual prejudice to be a predictor of aggression directed toward sexual minorities. In fact, the recurrence and consistency of this finding has motivated researchers to suggest the development of intervention programming for the reduction of sexual prejudice. One major prospect for intervention involves interpersonal contact with sexual minorities. Evidence in favor of the contact hypothesis has been found with a wide variety of target minority groups, including sexual minorities. However, a review of the literature in this area reveals a significant measurement gap. Overall, most studies across all areas of contact research have neglected to follow the proper procedures necessary for the development and refinement of measures. This study sought to address this gap by validating a more robust psychometric measure of intergroup contact with sexual minorities developed by Daboin and Peterson (2012). Since this measure was previously constructed, this validation study relied on secondary data analyses. To achieve the purpose of this study, a series of analyses were conducted including exploratory factor analysis (EFA), confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), and path analysis, as well as reliability and validity analyses. Results indicated that the CSMQ has an underlying structure of three factors: “Quantity of Casual Contact and Contact with Male Sexual Minorities,” “Quantity of Intimate Contact and Contact with Female Sexual Minorities,” and “Overall Perceived Quality of Contact with Sexual Minorities.” These three factors are significantly correlated with one another and negatively correlated with both negative attitudes toward gay men and lesbians. Additionally, results showed that the revised CSMQ and its resulting subscales have excellent internal consistency, and provided supporting evidence for their convergent, discriminant, and criterion-related validity.

In this research, our participants were asked five questions: Do gay and lesbian people fit into Chinese society? Are Chinese university students open and tolerant on gay and lesbian issues? How do these students perceive their gay and lesbian peers? How do their beliefs affect their attitudes toward their gay and lesbian peers? Is their university a safe and welcoming place for gay and lesbian students? To answer these questions, a qualitative methodology was employed involving six one-on-one interviews and two focus group interviews. <p>The participants did not believe that gay and lesbian people fit into Chinese society; however, the students themselves are becoming more open and tolerant on gay and lesbian issues in recent years because of the influence of technological innovation, media, and Western culture. <p>The findings suggest a degree of acceptance of gays and lesbians though the participants simultaneously distanced themselves from their homosexual peers. They perceived the university to be a safe place for gay and lesbian students in the sense that nobody would hurt them, but they did not see the university as a welcoming place. <p>To better understand the students perspectives, the transcripts were analyzed within a Chinese cultural and social context. Offering a realistic picture of heterosexual students perspectives might encourage them to reduce discrimination against their gay and lesbian peers, and to create a better learning environment for both heterosexual and homosexual students.

In this research, our participants were asked five questions: Do gay and lesbian people fit into Chinese society? Are Chinese university students open and tolerant on gay and lesbian issues? How do these students perceive their gay and lesbian peers? How do their beliefs affect their attitudes toward their gay and lesbian peers? Is their university a safe and welcoming place for gay and lesbian students? To answer these questions, a qualitative methodology was employed involving six one-on-one interviews and two focus group interviews. <p>The participants did not believe that gay and lesbian people fit into Chinese society; however, the students themselves are becoming more open and tolerant on gay and lesbian issues in recent years because of the influence of technological innovation, media, and Western culture. <p>The findings suggest a degree of acceptance of gays and lesbians though the participants simultaneously distanced themselves from their homosexual peers. They perceived the university to be a safe place for gay and lesbian students in the sense that nobody would hurt them, but they did not see the university as a welcoming place. <p>To better understand the students perspectives, the transcripts were analyzed within a Chinese cultural and social context. Offering a realistic picture of heterosexual students perspectives might encourage them to reduce discrimination against their gay and lesbian peers, and to create a better learning environment for both heterosexual and homosexual students.

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Master of Science / Department of Psychology / Donald A. Saucier / This research examines the effect of exposure to anti-gay humor on individuals’ tolerance of anti-gay discrimination. Participants were exposed to one of four conditions in a 2 (message type; joke or statement) x 2 (disparagement; anti-gay or neutral) design. They read vignettes that contained anti-gay jokes or statements, or neutral jokes or statements. Individuals’ sexual prejudice, humor styles, discrimination tolerance, feelings of compunction, and perceptions of others’ tolerance were also measured. Results showed that individuals exposed to humorous stimuli were more tolerant of discrimination, compared to those exposed to non-humorous stimuli. Further, levels of discrimination tolerance were significantly related both to individuals’ levels of sexual prejudice and their preference for an aggressive humor style. No significant interaction effects were found among these variables. These findings contribute to the literature on disparaging humor by examining its effects on targets of a different social group, and by incorporating humor style as a potential moderating variable.

It is widely accepted that the LGB (Lesbian, gay and bisexual) population have a higher risk of psychological distress compared to their heterosexual counterparts. Meyer (2003) proposed the minority stress model to explain this increased prevalence. This model proposed that the LGB population are subjected to additional stressors due to their minority status which results in the increased psychological distress observed. The purpose of this study was to investigate some of the risk factors proposed by this model, specifically experiences of sexual prejudice, negative internalised beliefs about homosexuality/bisexuality, coping strategies and how these factors interact to influence the development of psychological distress. This study included 542 LGB individuals who completed measures of sexual prejudice, internalised homophobia, coping strategies and current levels of psychological distress using an online survey. The study found a high prevalence of sexual prejudice within the sample, with 84% of the sample reporting at least one experience of sexual prejudice. 67% reported being verbally abused and 17% reported being physically assaulted. A high number of participants scored above the cut-off for a diagnosis of depression (27%) and anxiety (19%). Regression and path analysis revealed that maladaptive coping had the strongest effect on psychological distress. Sexual prejudice and internalised homophobia, also both had a significant direct impact upon psychological distress, and they were also partially mediated by maladaptive coping. Problem-focused coping was found to be a protective factor with a direct, albeit weak, effect on psychological distress. Problem-focused coping also partially mediated the relationship between sexual prejudice and psychological distress, slightly reducing the negative impact of sexual prejudice. The results suggest that maladaptive coping was the greatest risk factor, out of the ones measured, in the development of psychological distress in the LGB population. The outcomes suggest that clinical psychologists may wish to target their interventions at the development of more adaptive coping strategies, and the reduction of internalised homophobia. They should consider ways to reduce experiences of sexual prejudice by working at a community level to reduce the stigma of homosexuality/bisexuality.

In the current project, I examined the distinct elicitors and behavioral outcomes of anti-gay anger and anti-gay disgust. The CAD triad hypothesis (Rozin, Lower, Imada, & Haidt, 1999) suggests that anger and disgust are elicited by distinct moral violations and cognitive appraisals. A plethora of research has documented the strong link between disgust and sexual prejudice, but very little attention has been given to the role of anger in sexual prejudice. The biocultural framework of stigmatization (Neuberg, Smith, & Asher, 2000) suggests that people who counter-socialize against prevailing social norms are stigmatized by others. If homosexual sexual behavior does not elicit anti-gay anger (Giner-Sorrolla, Bosson, Caswell & Hettinger, 2012), then anti-gay anger might be elicited by promoting positive views of homosexuality. In Study 1, participants were induced to feel anger, disgust, or no emotion and then rated one of two gay male target groups. I expected that cognitive appraisals of morality violation would increase when the emotional state was congruent with the perceived threat posed by the target, but the emotion induction failed to elicit differences in cognitive appraisals. The results of Study 2, collected from a non-student sample, were also inconsistent with my hypothesis. Sexually explicit behavior did not elicit disgust, and behavior which resulted in more tolerant attitudes toward homosexuality failed to elicit anger and harm appraisals. These results suggest that sexual prejudice research requires stricter experimental control than online data collection methods currently allow.

abstract: Traditional perspectives on sexual prejudice typically focus on the distinction between heterosexual ingroup and homosexual outgroup. In contrast, I focus on an affordance-management paradigm which views prejudices as resulting not from ingroup/outgroup relations, but instead from perceptions of the threats and opportunities posed by members of different groups. Past research has demonstrated that non-heterosexual target groups are perceived to pose a variety of threats, including threats to the socialization of young children, of child molestation, of disease, and to values. My research, however, suggests sexual prejudices arise for college students from beliefs that certain sexual orientation groups pose threats of unwanted sexual interest. For young adults, mating concerns are salient and should define relevant threats and opportunities--including those that might drive prejudices. For individuals with different active motivations, however, different threats and opportunities and threats are salient, and so the threats driving sexual prejudices may also differ. I extend my past research to consider how activating different fundamental goals (e.g., disease avoidance, parenting) alters patterns of sexual prejudice. I posit that activating disease concerns will increase prejudice specifically toward non-heterosexuals associated with disease (gay and bisexual me)--but not other non-heterosexuals (lesbians and bisexual women)--whereas activating offspring care will increase prejudice toward all non-heterosexual target groups, as all are perceived to pose socialization threats. To test this, heterosexual participants were randomly assigned to a parenting or disease-avoidance goal activation, or control condition, and then rated their general negativity towards heterosexual, bisexual, and homosexual male and female targets. They also rated their perceptions of the extent to which each target posed unwanted sexual interest, socialization, and disease threats. Contrary to predictions, activating parenting and disease avoidance systems failed to affect sexual prejudices. Furthermore, although the pattern of observed data was largely consistent with previously observed patterns, women's attitudes towards gay men in the control condition were more negative than that found in previous studies, as were men's attitudes towards bisexual and lesbian women. Multiple mechanisms underlie sexual prejudices, and research is needed to better understand the circumstances under which alternative mechanisms are engaged and have their effects. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Psychology 2012

Submitted by Maria Suzana Diniz (msuzanad@hotmail.com) on 2015-10-15T14:25:40Z No. of bitstreams: 1 arquivototal.pdf: 5220999 bytes, checksum: c004433c773badf0404e496b8145de55 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2015-10-15T14:25:40Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 arquivototal.pdf: 5220999 bytes, checksum: c004433c773badf0404e496b8145de55 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-04-16 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES / The present thesis aimed at knowing the correlates and predictors of attitudes toward homosexual parenting, based on explicit and implicit variables. In order to attain this objective, five studies were conducted. Study 1 aimed at mapping participants’ opinions about child adoption by homosexual parents. Participants were 484 people from general population, with mean age of 26 years (SD = 8.31). They answered to social and demographic questions, and to a structured interview. In sum, results showed a potential acceptance of this type of adoption, as long as the parents have favorable financial, emotional and educational background. Study 2 sought to test psychometric parameters of the relevant measures. Therefore, a sample of 223 undergraduates participated, their mean age was 22 years (SD = 4.42). Participants answered to experimental versions of the following measures: Attitudes toward Homosexual Marriage Scale (ATHM) and the Sexual Prejudice Multidimensional Scale (SPMS). The main results indicated that both measures gathered preliminary evidences of validity and reliability. Study 3 aimed at gathering more robust psychometric evidences of the measures used in the previous study. Participants were 261 people from general population, with mean age of 30 years (SD = 9.35). The results confirmed the assumed factor structures for both scales, indicating psychometric adequacy of a reduced model (parsimonious). Study 4 allowed the development of an explanatory model regarding acceptance and/or opposition to homosexual parenting. Participants were 339 people from different Brazilian states, with mean age of 26 years (SD = 8.15). They answered to the short version of scales used in the previous study, and the Basic Values Survey (BVS), behavioral, and demographic variables. Results showed adequacy of two models: (1) Sexual prejudice/ Values → Acceptance of Homosexual Parenting → Homosexual parenting contact acceptance [²/df = 3.77, GFI = .99, AGFI = .93, CFI = .98, RMR = .02 e RMSEA = .09 (.023 – .163)] and (2) Sexual prejudice/ Values → Opposition of homosexual parenting → Homosexual parenting contact rejection [²/df = 4.46, GFI = .98, AGFI = .91, CFI = .97, RMR = .01 e RMSEA = .10 (.057 – .151)]. Finally, Study 5 aimed at controlling social desirability and at verifying implicit attitudes toward homosexual parenting and its value correlates. It was a quasi-experimental study with a factorial design 2x2x3. Participants were 458 people recruited online, with mean age of 23 yeas (SD = 7.6). They answered to demographic questions and to explicit and implicitmeasures. The results indicated that heterosexual parenting was considered more conventional than homosexual parenting, corroborating the hypothesis of a heterosexual norm, and an influence of normative values. In conclusion, the objectives of the present dissertation were attained, providing additional and substantial evidence to identify factors that explain attitudes toward homosexual parenting, and of the role of normative values. Nevertheless, future studies are proposed, aiming at contributing to the field. / A presente tese objetivou conhecer os correlatos e preditores das atitudes frente à homoparentalidade, a partir de variáveis explícitas e implícitas. Para atender este objetivo, realizaram-se cinco estudos. O Estudo 1, objetivou mapear as opiniões dos participantes acerca do contexto de adoção de crianças por homossexuais. Participaram 484 pessoas da população geral, com idade média de 26 anos (DP = 8,31). Estes responderam, além das perguntas sociodemográficas, a um roteiro de entrevista semiestruturada. Em síntese, os resultados apontam para uma potencial aceitação homoparental, desde que condicionada a um contexto de favorabilidade emocional, financeira e educacional dos adotantes. O Estudo 2 buscou testar os parâmetros psicométricos das medidas ora empregadas. Para tanto, contou-se com uma amostra de 223 estudante universitários, estes tinham idade média de 22 anos (DP = 4,42). Os participantes responderam as versões experimentais das seguintes medidas: a Escala de Atitudes Frente à Conjugalidade Homossexual (EAFCH), a Escala de Atitudes Frente à Homoparentalidade por Adoção (EAFHA) e a Escala de Multidimensional de Preconceito Sexual (EMPS). Os principais resultados indicam que tais medidas reúnem evidências preliminares de validade e precisão. O Estudo 3 teve a finalidade de reunir evidências mais robustas de qualidade psicométrica dos instrumentos utilizados anteriormente. Participaram 261 sujeitos da população geral com idade média de 30 anos (DP = 9,35). Os resultados permitiram comprovar as estruturas fatoriais presumidas de tais medidas e indicaram a adequação psicométrica dos modelos reduzidos (parcimoniosos). O Estudo 4, propiciou a elaboração dos modelos explicativos referentes a aceitação e/ou oposição homoparental. Participaram deste estudo 339 indivíduos de diferentes estados brasileiros, com idade média de 26 anos (DP= 8,15). Estes responderam às versões reduzidas das escalas utilizadas no estudo anterior e ao Questionário dos Valores Básicos (QVB) e a Variáveis Comportamentais e Sociodemográficas. Os resultados comprovaram a adequação de dois modelos explicativos: (1) o modelo explicativo Preconceito sexual/ Valores → Aceitação da homoparental → Aceitação do contato homoparental [²/gl = 3,77, GFI = 0,99, AGFI = 0,93, CFI = 0,98, RMR = 0,02 e RMSEA = 0,09 (0,023 – 0,163)] e (2) o modelo explicativo Preconceito sexual/ Valores → Oposição homoparental → Rejeição do contato homoparental [²/gl = 4,46, GFI = 0,98, AGFI = 0,91, CFI = 0,97, RMR = 0,01 e RMSEA = 0,10 (0,057 – 0,151)]. Finalmente o Estudo 5, objetivou eliminar o componente desejabilidade social e conhecer as atitudes implícitas frente à homoparentalidade e os seus correlatos explícitos. Tratou-se de um estudo quase-experimental com delineamento fatorial do tipo 2x2x3. Contou-se com a participação de 458 indivíduos da população geral, com idade média de 23 anos (DP = 7,6). Estes responderam a um questionário sociodemográficos e a Medidas Explícitas e Implícitas Os resultados indicaram que os arranjos heteroparentais foram considerados mais convencionais do que os arranjos homoparentais, corroborando a hipótese heteronormativa, assim como a influência dos valores normativos. Concluindo, os objetivos da presente tese foram alcançados, referendando o marco teórico que permite identificar fatores que contribuem para explicação das atitudes frente à homoparentalidade, com destaque especial aos valores normativos. Não obstante, propuseram-se estudos futuros que visem contribuir para esta área de interesse.

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