60 Seconds with…Dr Qazi Rahman

QR There’s nothing really mystical about people’s experience of love, sexual arousal and romantic attraction – they’re not unexplainable cognitive phenomena. The first port of call is to measure people’s emotional responses. Measures like attraction can simply be recorded on a scale by assessing people’s responses on a questionnaire, asking whether they’re attracted to people of the same gender or opposite gender. Or you can use techniques like brain imaging, where you show images of their preferred partners, or current romantic partner, and then look at their brain responses. Although this is a less robust measure. Another way is to look at physiological responses, like how much sweating there is in the palm in response to those pictures.
Cognitive psychologists recently have been working on whether this is a good way of measuring all these things and whether you can develop really quick, automatic computer based tests that draw people’s attention to what they prefer. You might test gay men and straight men and show them pictures of nude men and women in quick succession – so quickly that it’s unconsciously processed.

LS Like subliminal advertising?

QR A bit like that, yes. Afterwards you’d have a nonsense task: “Decide if this shape is a square or a triangle.” What you’d predict is that people tend to get the answer right in the area of the screen where they saw more of their preferred image. It’s a test we refer to as attention orientating. Our common sense understanding of how you do love and attraction in the real world is that you go into a bar or a cafe, suddenly someone draws your attention and you can’t take your eyes off of them. Feelings people describe like chemistry can be broken down into those sort of things.

LS What is your area of research?

QR I study the origins of sexual orientation… what makes people gay or straight. To do that we combine methods from biology and experimental psychology to decipher the genetic and non-genetic mechanisms that lead to variations in sexuality – what are the paths a brain goes down on the way to being gay or straight.
My research focuses less on romantic attractions and those sorts of processes, although they are related, but what makes people gay and links with mental health research. We have three strands of research, one is trying to understand the genetics of sexual orientation. We can test twins, identical and non identical, if identical twin pairs are more similar on a trait it means that there might be a genetic component. We can use complicated maths to break that all down and decide if those traits are due mostly to genetic factors or due to environmental factors. This is quite controversial but parents have very little sway in how their kids turn out – not just in sexuality but in just about every single trait ever measured, essentially parents don’t really matter. However, it’s also not 100% genetic. It’s partly genetic and might partly be due to other biological factors.