Read the research article added here, read-only study 1, and answer the question:1. What type of variable is target sexual orientation?Group of answer choicesA. Quasi-independent variableB. Outcome variableC. Dependent variableD. Quasi-dependent variableE. Independent variableF. Predictor variable Mating Interest Improves Women'sAccuracy in Judging Male SexualOrientationNicholas O. Rule', Katherine S. Rosen², Michael L. Slepian², andNalini Ambady²'University of Toronto and Tufts UniversityKeywordssexual orientation, social perceptionReceived 12/17/10; Revision accepted 3/22/11AbstractPeople can accurately infer others' traits and group memberships across several domains. We examined heterosexual women'saccuracy in judging male sexual orientation across the fertility cycle (Study I) and found that women's accuracy was significantlygreater the nearer they were to peak ovulation. In contrast, women's accuracy was not related to their fertility when theyjudged the sexual orientations of other women (Study 2). Increased sexual interest brought about by the increased likelihoodof conception near ovulation may therefore influence women's sensitivity to male sexual orientation. To test this hypothesis, wemanipulated women's interest in mating using an unobtrusive priming task (Study 3). Women primed with romantic thoughtsshowed significantly greater accuracy in their categorizations of male sexual orientation (but not female sexual orientation)compared with women who were not primed. The accuracy of judgments of male sexual orientation therefore appears to beinfluenced by both natural variations in female perceivers' fertility and experimentally manipulated cognitive frames.Recent evidence has shown that perceivers are capable ofextracting information from the nonverbal behaviors andappearance of other people. Teachers' nonverbal behaviorspredict their students' and principals' evaluations (Ambady &Rosenthal, 1993), facial maturity predicts job opportunitiesand court verdicts (Collins & Zebrowitz, 1995; Zebrowitz &McDonald, 1991), and inferences of personality from facescan predict leaders' success in business and politics (Rule &Ambady, 2010). One domain in which perceivers are particu-larly efficient is categorizing people according to groupmemberships (Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2000). Perceiverseffortlessly categorize people according to age, race, and gen-der, in part because the physical characteristics distinguishingthese groups are somewhat obvious (Brewer, 1988). Yet per-ceivers also have a capacity to categorize people according tocharacteristics that are not as visually obvious, such as sexualorientation (Ambady, Hallahan, & Conner, 1999). In the studyreported here, we explored one factor that might influencejudgments of other people sexual interest in a particulardomain judgments of sexual orientation.Previous work has found that sexual orientation can bejudged with surprising accuracy by guessing from facial cues.Psychological Science22(7) 881-886©The Author(s) 2011Reprints and permissionsagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navDOI: 10.1177/0956797611412394http://pss.sagepub.comSSAGEBoth male and female sexual orientation were judged signifi-cantly better than chance when participants viewed faces foras little as 40 ms (e.g., Rule, Ambady, & Hallett, 2009). Onequestion that arises from these demonstrations of accuracyconcerns individual differences. Regarding sexual orientation,gay men tend to make more accurate judgments than dostraight men (Rule, Ambady, Adams, & Macrae, 2007). Thiscould be because gay men are more attentive to differences intargets' sexual orientations or because gay men have moreexpertise judging sexual orientation. These hypotheses arecommon to theories of in-group effects in perception andmemory (Sporer, 2001). For instance, individuals perform bet-ter at distinguishing emotions from the faces of in-group ver-sus out-group members (Elfenbein & Ambady, 2003).Yet there are also group- and individual-level variations injudging nonverbal behavior that are not directly related to in-group effects. Women tend to be better judges of nonverbalDownloaded from passagepub.com by Michael Sepan on July 20, 2011Corresponding Author:Nicholas O. Rule, Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, 100 St.George St. Toronto, Ontario, Canada MSS 3G3E-mail rule@psych.utoronto.cabehavior than men are (e.g., Hall & Andrzejewski, 2008), andextraverts are often better judges of other peoples' traits thanare introverts (Lieberman & Rosenthal, 2001). In the domainof deception detection, people are slightly but significantlymore accurate than chance in judgments of deception fromnonverbal cues (Bond & DePaulo, 2006), but there is consid-erable interindividual variation in this ability (Bond &DePaulo, 2008).One biological factor known to exert an influence on per-ceptions of other people is variation in women's fertilitycycles. Women have been found to categorize male facesfaster than female faces at periods of high fertility (aroundovulation) compared with periods of nonfertility (Johnston,Arden, Macrae, & Grace, 2003; Macrae, Alnwick, Milne, &Schloerscheidt, 2002). Similarly, women nearer ovulationrated masculinized faces (Penton-Voak et al., 1999) and mas-culine body gaits (Provost, Troje, & Quinsey, 2008) as moreattractive. These effects did not apply to men, women usingsystemic contraceptive medication, and pregnant women(Johnston et al., 2003). Moreover, lesbian women actuallyshowed opposite effects: They categorized female faces fasterthan male faces during high fertility (Brinsmead-Stockham,Johnston, Miles, & Macrae, 2008). Attention to sexually rele-vant targets thus varies depending on women's fertility status,and women's fertility can have multiple effects on social per-ception (Jones et al., 2008).It seems reasonable, then, that women's accuracy in judg-ing male sexual orientation might also depend on fertilitycycles and sexual relevance. We therefore tested heterosexualwomen's accuracy in judging sexual orientation across the fer-tility cycle; our hypothesis was that accuracy for male faceswould be greater nearer to peak ovulation (Study 1) but thatovulation would not affect the categorization of sexually irrel-evant women's faces (Study 2). Finally, we examined whetherincreasing women's sexual interest through cognitive primingmight increase their accuracy in judging sexual orientation,just as natural variations in sexual interest are brought on bythe fertility cycle (Study 3).Study IAlthough it is fairly well established that fertility influenceswomen's attention to sexually relevant cues, it is not knownwhether this increased attention might also benefit the accu-racy of person judgments. In Study 1, we therefore asked het-erosexual women to judge sexual orientation from men'sfaces, and we related the women's accuracy to their fertilitystatus.MethodParticipants. Forty heterosexual undergraduate womenresponded to an advertisement requesting female under-graduates not using systemic contraceptive medication to par-ticipate in a psychology study in exchange for monetarycompensation. Respondents verified that they were not usingany contraceptive medications at the time of scheduling andat the end of their respective experimental sessions. Oneparticipant reported irregular cycles and was excluded fromanalysis.Stimuli. Photos of faces of self-identified gay men (n = 40)and straight men (n=40) were taken from a stimulus set vali-dated in earlier studies (Rule et al., 2007; Rule, Ambady,Adams, & Macrae, 2008). The photos were gray-scale imagesstandardized for size, and none of the targets had adornments(e.g., jewelry, facial hair). Moreover, the gay and straight mendid not differ in emotional expression or attractiveness (seeRule et al., 2008, for details).Procedure. Participants were instructed that they would viewmen's faces on a computer screen and would be asked to indi-cate each man's probable sexual orientation as gay or straightby pressing a key. Participants were encouraged to use theirintuition in making judgments and not to think about any oneface too much. Afterward, the women volunteered their ownsexual orientations and reported the duration of time since lastmenses and the typical length of their fertility cycle. Thesedata were used to estimate each woman's point in her cycleusing a backward-counting method implemented in previousresearch (e.g., Brinsmead-Stockham et al., 2008).ResultsAccuracy and response bias were calculated using signaldetection theory (e.g., Sporer, 2001). Accuracy was signifi-cantly greater than chance guessing (.50; see Table 1) and,more important, varied according to fertility status. Peak ovu-lation was estimated as 14 days prior to next expected menses.For women who were postpeak, the distance in time from peakovulation was calculated by dividing the number of days post-peak by 14, and for women who were prepeak, the number ofdays prepeak was divided by the difference between peak ovu-lation and reported cycle length (cycle length: M- 30 days,SD-4 days). This yielded positive proportions for postpeakwomen and negative proportions for prepeak women, withpeak ovulation centered at 0.These proportions showed a significant curvilinear rela-tionship, such that the nearer women were to peak ovulation,the more accurate they were in judging men's sexual orienta-tions, F(2, 36)-4.71, p.02, R-21 (Fig. 1). Response biasshowed a tendency for women to perceive men as straightrather than gay, but it was unrelated to the women's fertilityand thus showed neither linear nor curvilinear trends, Fs.17.Although our previous work found no differences in attrac-tiveness between the gay and straight men in this stimulus set(Rule et al., 2008), perceptions of attractiveness are known tobe related to women's fertility. We therefore asked 24 separateparticipants to judge the attractiveness of the faces along Female Fertility and Judgments of Sexual OrientationAccuracy (A').90.80.70.60.50.40-Table 1. Accuracy (A) and Response Bias (B') in Judging Sexual Orientation in Studies IThrough 3.30-1.00Study and conditionStudy IStudy 2Study 3aControlMating primeStudy 3bControlMating prime*p

Question

Read the research article added here, read-only study 1, and answer the question:1. What type of variable is target sexual orientation?Group of answer choicesA. Quasi-independent variableB. Outcome variableC. Dependent variableD. Quasi-dependent variableE. Independent variableF. Predictor variable Mating Interest Improves Women'sAccuracy in Judging Male SexualOrientationNicholas O. Rule', Katherine S. Rosen², Michael L. Slepian², andNalini Ambady²'University of Toronto and Tufts UniversityKeywordssexual orientation, social perceptionReceived 12/17/10; Revision accepted 3/22/11AbstractPeople can accurately infer others' traits and group memberships across several domains. We examined heterosexual women'saccuracy in judging male sexual orientation across the fertility cycle (Study I) and found that women's accuracy was significantlygreater the nearer they were to peak ovulation. In contrast, women's accuracy was not related to their fertility when theyjudged the sexual orientations of other women (Study 2). Increased sexual interest brought about by the increased likelihoodof conception near ovulation may therefore influence women's sensitivity to male sexual orientation. To test this hypothesis, wemanipulated women's interest in mating using an unobtrusive priming task (Study 3). Women primed with romantic thoughtsshowed significantly greater accuracy in their categorizations of male sexual orientation (but not female sexual orientation)compared with women who were not primed. The accuracy of judgments of male sexual orientation therefore appears to beinfluenced by both natural variations in female perceivers' fertility and experimentally manipulated cognitive frames.Recent evidence has shown that perceivers are capable ofextracting information from the nonverbal behaviors andappearance of other people. Teachers' nonverbal behaviorspredict their students' and principals' evaluations (Ambady &Rosenthal, 1993), facial maturity predicts job opportunitiesand court verdicts (Collins & Zebrowitz, 1995; Zebrowitz &McDonald, 1991), and inferences of personality from facescan predict leaders' success in business and politics (Rule &Ambady, 2010). One domain in which perceivers are particu-larly efficient is categorizing people according to groupmemberships (Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2000). Perceiverseffortlessly categorize people according to age, race, and gen-der, in part because the physical characteristics distinguishingthese groups are somewhat obvious (Brewer, 1988). Yet per-ceivers also have a capacity to categorize people according tocharacteristics that are not as visually obvious, such as sexualorientation (Ambady, Hallahan, & Conner, 1999). In the studyreported here, we explored one factor that might influencejudgments of other people sexual interest in a particulardomain judgments of sexual orientation.Previous work has found that sexual orientation can bejudged with surprising accuracy by guessing from facial cues.Psychological Science22(7) 881-886©The Author(s) 2011Reprints and permissionsagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navDOI: 10.1177/0956797611412394http://pss.sagepub.comSSAGEBoth male and female sexual orientation were judged signifi-cantly better than chance when participants viewed faces foras little as 40 ms (e.g., Rule, Ambady, & Hallett, 2009). Onequestion that arises from these demonstrations of accuracyconcerns individual differences. Regarding sexual orientation,gay men tend to make more accurate judgments than dostraight men (Rule, Ambady, Adams, & Macrae, 2007). Thiscould be because gay men are more attentive to differences intargets' sexual orientations or because gay men have moreexpertise judging sexual orientation. These hypotheses arecommon to theories of in-group effects in perception andmemory (Sporer, 2001). For instance, individuals perform bet-ter at distinguishing emotions from the faces of in-group ver-sus out-group members (Elfenbein & Ambady, 2003).Yet there are also group- and individual-level variations injudging nonverbal behavior that are not directly related to in-group effects. Women tend to be better judges of nonverbalDownloaded from passagepub.com by Michael Sepan on July 20, 2011Corresponding Author:Nicholas O. Rule, Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, 100 St.George St. Toronto, Ontario, Canada MSS 3G3E-mail rule@psych.utoronto.cabehavior than men are (e.g., Hall & Andrzejewski, 2008), andextraverts are often better judges of other peoples' traits thanare introverts (Lieberman & Rosenthal, 2001). In the domainof deception detection, people are slightly but significantlymore accurate than chance in judgments of deception fromnonverbal cues (Bond & DePaulo, 2006), but there is consid-erable interindividual variation in this ability (Bond &DePaulo, 2008).One biological factor known to exert an influence on per-ceptions of other people is variation in women's fertilitycycles. Women have been found to categorize male facesfaster than female faces at periods of high fertility (aroundovulation) compared with periods of nonfertility (Johnston,Arden, Macrae, & Grace, 2003; Macrae, Alnwick, Milne, &Schloerscheidt, 2002). Similarly, women nearer ovulationrated masculinized faces (Penton-Voak et al., 1999) and mas-culine body gaits (Provost, Troje, & Quinsey, 2008) as moreattractive. These effects did not apply to men, women usingsystemic contraceptive medication, and pregnant women(Johnston et al., 2003). Moreover, lesbian women actuallyshowed opposite effects: They categorized female faces fasterthan male faces during high fertility (Brinsmead-Stockham,Johnston, Miles, & Macrae, 2008). Attention to sexually rele-vant targets thus varies depending on women's fertility status,and women's fertility can have multiple effects on social per-ception (Jones et al., 2008).It seems reasonable, then, that women's accuracy in judg-ing male sexual orientation might also depend on fertilitycycles and sexual relevance. We therefore tested heterosexualwomen's accuracy in judging sexual orientation across the fer-tility cycle; our hypothesis was that accuracy for male faceswould be greater nearer to peak ovulation (Study 1) but thatovulation would not affect the categorization of sexually irrel-evant women's faces (Study 2). Finally, we examined whetherincreasing women's sexual interest through cognitive primingmight increase their accuracy in judging sexual orientation,just as natural variations in sexual interest are brought on bythe fertility cycle (Study 3).Study IAlthough it is fairly well established that fertility influenceswomen's attention to sexually relevant cues, it is not knownwhether this increased attention might also benefit the accu-racy of person judgments. In Study 1, we therefore asked het-erosexual women to judge sexual orientation from men'sfaces, and we related the women's accuracy to their fertilitystatus.MethodParticipants. Forty heterosexual undergraduate womenresponded to an advertisement requesting female under-graduates not using systemic contraceptive medication to par-ticipate in a psychology study in exchange for monetarycompensation. Respondents verified that they were not usingany contraceptive medications at the time of scheduling andat the end of their respective experimental sessions. Oneparticipant reported irregular cycles and was excluded fromanalysis.Stimuli. Photos of faces of self-identified gay men (n = 40)and straight men (n=40) were taken from a stimulus set vali-dated in earlier studies (Rule et al., 2007; Rule, Ambady,Adams, & Macrae, 2008). The photos were gray-scale imagesstandardized for size, and none of the targets had adornments(e.g., jewelry, facial hair). Moreover, the gay and straight mendid not differ in emotional expression or attractiveness (seeRule et al., 2008, for details).Procedure. Participants were instructed that they would viewmen's faces on a computer screen and would be asked to indi-cate each man's probable sexual orientation as gay or straightby pressing a key. Participants were encouraged to use theirintuition in making judgments and not to think about any oneface too much. Afterward, the women volunteered their ownsexual orientations and reported the duration of time since lastmenses and the typical length of their fertility cycle. Thesedata were used to estimate each woman's point in her cycleusing a backward-counting method implemented in previousresearch (e.g., Brinsmead-Stockham et al., 2008).ResultsAccuracy and response bias were calculated using signaldetection theory (e.g., Sporer, 2001). Accuracy was signifi-cantly greater than chance guessing (.50; see Table 1) and,more important, varied according to fertility status. Peak ovu-lation was estimated as 14 days prior to next expected menses.For women who were postpeak, the distance in time from peakovulation was calculated by dividing the number of days post-peak by 14, and for women who were prepeak, the number ofdays prepeak was divided by the difference between peak ovu-lation and reported cycle length (cycle length: M- 30 days,SD-4 days). This yielded positive proportions for postpeakwomen and negative proportions for prepeak women, withpeak ovulation centered at 0.These proportions showed a significant curvilinear rela-tionship, such that the nearer women were to peak ovulation,the more accurate they were in judging men's sexual orienta-tions, F(2, 36)-4.71, p.02, R-21 (Fig. 1). Response biasshowed a tendency for women to perceive men as straightrather than gay, but it was unrelated to the women's fertilityand thus showed neither linear nor curvilinear trends, Fs<1.86, ps>.17.Although our previous work found no differences in attrac-tiveness between the gay and straight men in this stimulus set(Rule et al., 2008), perceptions of attractiveness are known tobe related to women's fertility. We therefore asked 24 separateparticipants to judge the attractiveness of the faces along Female Fertility and Judgments of Sexual OrientationAccuracy (A').90.80.70.60.50.40-Table 1. Accuracy (A) and Response Bias (B') in Judging Sexual Orientation in Studies IThrough 3.30-1.00Study and conditionStudy IStudy 2Study 3aControlMating primeStudy 3bControlMating prime*p<.001.M.61.61.60.66.64.637-point scale. The judges showed consensus in their assess-ments (Cronbach's a = .85), and the judgments were thereforeaveraged across raters for each target. The mean attractivenessratings were then correlated with the dichotomous ratings ofthe targets as gay and straight from the main study, and thesesensitivity correlations were converted using Fisher's r-to-Ztransformation to produce an estimate of the relationshipbetween each participant's categorization and the attractive-ness of the faces. The relationship between attractiveness andthe categorizations of the faces was not significant (a = .05),as the 95% confidence interval (CI) surrounding the meanFisher Z-transformed correlation contained 0, 95% CI=[-0.03, 0.07].A'SD.12.06.08.12.06.07tt(38) = 5.52*t(33) = 10.39*t(18)= 4.93*t(20) = 6.13*1.00t(20) = 10.88*t(20) = 7.64*-.50.00.50Time From Estimated OvulationFig. 1. Results from Study I: women's accuracy (A) in categorizing men'ssexual orientations as a function of distance in time from estimated ovulation.The graph presents individual data points and a trend line showing thequadratic fit.Effect size (r).67.88.74.81.89.81M.08.14.04.10Downloaded from pss.sagepub.com by Michael Slepian on July 20, 2011B'SD.15.13.09.20.22.19.20 .17883DiscussionWomen's accuracy in judging men's sexual orientations fromtheir faces was greater the nearer the women were to peak ovu-lation. Targets' sexual orientation may therefore be moresalient or legible for perceivers when it is more relevant. Inprevious work, we found that gay men were more accuratejudges of male sexual orientation than were straight men (Ruleet al., 2007). This could be because gay men are more familiaror experienced with distinguishing sexual orientation, orbecause information about male sexual orientation is more rel-evant for gay men than for straight men. The present data pro-vide some support for this relevance hypothesis. Specifically,women's success in conceiving is greater nearer to peak ovula-tion. One factor assisting their reproductive success is the abil-ity to identify a suitable mate. Thus, women may be moreattentive to sexual orientation nearer to ovulation because tar-gets' candidacy as mates would be more relevant. Yet it is alsopossible that women may be more attentive overall to nonver-bal appearance cues nearer ovulation. To investigate this pos-sibility, Study 2 measured heterosexual women's ability tojudge other women's sexual orientation from their faces.Study 2Thirty-four heterosexual women not using systemic contracep-tion (cycle length: M= 30 days, SD = 4.6 days) were recruitedas in Study 1. Procedures were identical to Study 1, with theexception that participants viewed the faces of 100 lesbian and100 straight women. Photos were validated in earlier work(Rule et al., 2009). The photos were gray-scale images stan-dardized for size, and none of the targets had adornments.Moreover, the lesbian and straight women did not differ in emo-tional expression, attractiveness, or the use of makeup.Data were again analyzed using signal detection theory.Accuracy was significantly greater than chance guessing(Table 1) but was unrelated to participants' fertility; accuracy

Accepted Answer

The variable "target sexual orientation" is an E. independent variable in Study 1.
The researchers…