Implicit attitudes towards sexually and reproductively relevant stimuli : do female attitudes vary based on sexual orientation, conception-risk, and hormonal contraceptive use?

Abstract

Previous research has suggested that females at high fertility may be more sensitive to cues of sexual-relevance as opposed to reproductive-relevance. The current study examined this issue by having females of varying sexual orientation complete two implicit association tasks (IAT) while they were in either a high-conception risk phase (i.e., fertile phase) or low-conception risk phase (i.e., non-fertile phase), as well as comparing this data to women who were currently taking hormonal contraceptives. The IAT is an implicit measure designed to detect the strength of a person's automatic association between mental representations of concepts in memory. The first IAT assessed attitudes towards cues of reproductively relevant stimuli (images of women who are or are not visibly pregnant) and the second IAT examined cues of sexually relevant stimuli (images of provocatively or conservatively dressed women). Results suggest that women did differ on implicit attitudes towards both stimuli; however, these differences were not statistically significant.