These summaries of selected research projects give you a glimpse into what our Kinsey Institute researchers are working on today. You can find more information on these projects, and information on all our ongoing research on our Current Research page >>

Kinsey Institute researcher Dr. Heather Rupp is the lead author in a study analyzing the viewing patterns of men and women looking at sexual photographs. The results are not what you might expect.

Researchers hypothesized that women would look at faces in the photographs and men would look at genitals. Instead, they found that the men were more likely than the women to look at a woman’s face before other parts of the body, and that the women focused longer than the men did on photographs of men performing sexual acts with women.

The study also confirms that men and women looking at sexual material will show different patterns of brain activity. “Men looked at the female face much more than women, and both looked at the genitals comparably,” said Dr. Rupp. The data also suggested that women’s responses varied according to their hormonal state, with women on oral contraceptives paying more attention to genitals than other women in the study.

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