Small update: There appear to be about
70 books and articles that reference Adams' 1996 study. I will be slowly going through them, and figured I'd post a link to the list for others to do so as well.
Please don't consider this thread necromancy...think of it more like Arnold Schwarzenegger saying "I told you I'll be back" in
Terminator 2. It took me a while to go through all the non-book references in the above link (and big thanks to sidhe for helping me track down the last couple of problematic references). I was going through the references to further
rebut some of wpa997's assertions that Adams' testing methodology was wrong.
So I've read through the abstracts of all the articles that cite Adams, and read the full articles that looked like they had the most bearing on testing methodology. Interestingly enough, out of these nearly 70 articles in different journals,
nobody had published any journal articles that called Adams' 1996 methodology and results into question.
I also found two more studies that tried to physiologically measure reactions to homosexuality. The first was Shields and Harriman's "Fear of Male Homosexuality: Cardiac responses of low and high homonegative males" [Journal of Homosexuality 1984 Fall;10(1-2):53-67]. This study separated people into homophobic and nonhomophobic participants, and measured their heart rates as they were shown sexual slides. The homophobic participants' heart rates increased when they were shown homosexual slides, but it can't be determined if the reactions were caused by fear or by arousal, since both reactions would cause similar increases in heart rate.
The other study was Mahaffey et al's "Using Startle Eye Blink to Measure the Affective Component of Antigay Bias" [Basic and Applied Social Psychology 2005; 27(1): 37-45]. This study, along with Adams and Shields' works, further reinforces that there is a correlation between male homophobes and a strong reaction (this time in startle reaction) to male homosexual stimuli (but not female homosexual stimuli). Unfortunately, it could not clarify whether or not homophobes are experience fear or arousal, either.
I was hoping for some studies involving neuroimaging (MRI, PET, etc) to measure reactions, but so far none has been done (instrument time on these machines can be expensive, especially when you are testing large numbers of people, and this may be why).
Interestingly enough I also found a
paper by Bernd Wittenbrink on correlations between survey questions and other measurements, which might quell WPA's doubts that self-reporting questionnaires are accurate tools.
If you'd like to talk about these papers in more detail, I can email Mahaffety's to you. I just ran across the Shields article tonight, and haven't had the chance to run by a library to read it in full -- all my knowledge on it is from comments in other papers. But when I do, I can also get that out.
Wpa997 had some allegations that Adams was engaged in intellectual dishonesty to reach his conclusions. So far I haven't found anything; if wpa997 ever returns to CF, I invite him to provide some peer-reviewed scientific evidence that backs up his claim. If anyone else has such evidence, they are likewise invited.
So, to summarize:
- No journal articles have questioned Adams' methodology and results
- Two other studies have measured a correlation between homophobia and a physiological reaction to male homosexual stimuli
- There is no conclusive evidence that the male homophobes' reaction male homosexual stimuli to is arousal or fear (or a combination of the two), which means currently both are possible
