Asexual but not aromantic? Research study is looking for your input.

[MScheller]

Hi all,

 

We are a team of researchers from the United Kingdom and Canada, interested finding out how sexual attraction affects what we are looking for in a romantic partner.

The study will be open for participation soon, but before that we would like to give you an opportunity to have an influence on the study itself 😊 As sexual and romantic orientation are very personal and individual experiences, we want to make sure that the research we do is in line with the interests of the asexual community in how asexuality is portrayed.

 

We are therefore looking for 3-4 experts (you), who would like to share their opinions with us regarding how they see the study aims and phrasing fit in with the values you hold towards asexuality, and what can be improved to better reach and represent the community. Ideally we are looking for individuals who identify as asexual but not aromantic, however this is not a strict criterion and we welcome all ACEs. The only requirement is that you are 18 years or older. 

 

If you are interested in being involved, or have any other questions related to the study/topic, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with Meike via meike.scheller@abdn.ac.uk

Meike will then arrange an online meeting with you where she will introduce you to the study idea and plan and you can discuss your opinions and ideas. Prior knowledge in conducting research is not necessary.

 

 

If you would rather be interested in contributing to the study as a participant, we will provide an access link to the study through the AVEN network soon. 

[MScheller]

Hi all, 

 

Thank you very much for all the members that have already replied to our request! 👏💐 You have given us some amazing, helpful feedback! 

 

We will now take this feedback back to our study and implement some changes.

The study will be open once we have made the final adjustments and we welcome anyone that is interested in this topic to take part. A link to the study will be made available on the AVEN network once the study goes live. Thanks again for your great input.

 

Stay safe and healthy everyone.

[MScheller]

Update: Thanks to your great help, the study is online now 👏  It is open to anyone 18 years or older.

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Hi all,

 

We are a team of researchers from the UK and Canada that are interested in understanding how attraction influences what we are looking for in a partner.

We believe that being asexual does not reduce our desire to engage in a romantic relationship with a significant other person. Similarly, we also believe that being aromantic does not exclude wanting to engage in a close bond with a significant other. Previous research into partner preferences has almost exclusively focussed on allosexual (specifically heterosexual) individuals. Furthermore, due to this strong focus on heterosexuality, the differential roles that sexual and romantic attraction might play have not yet been established.

 

Who can take part:

TLDR: anyone 18 years or older.

For the present study we are looking for participants from a wide range of the sexual and romantic attraction spectra: Whether you identify as asexual, greysexual, demisexual, allosexual (hetero-, homo-, bi-, pan-sexual), or are currently unsure about your sexual orientation, you are very welcome to take part. Similarly, we would also like to invite people whose romantic orientation falls anywhere within the spectrum from aromantic to alloromantic. We are also happy for you to share this study invitation with any friends or family members that you think might be interested. The only requirement is that you need to be 18 years or older.

 

We would love to get input from both cis- or trans-gendered individuals, however, please note that a robust analysis is only possible when we get a sufficient amount of responses from each group. That means, only if we get responses from many trans-gendered individuals can we analyse this group’s data as well.

 

What the study involves:

The study is entirely online-based and anonymous. We will not ask you to provide any details that would lead to your personal identification. It consists of 3 sections/pages:

1. You will get some basic information about participation in this online study and complete a consent form.
2. This part asks you about some basic demographic information, assesses you sexual and romantic orientation profile, and what you consider important in a (potential) partner.
3. You will be shown different faces and asked to rate how attractive you find them.

 

Study link:

http://www.alittlelab.com/expts/2020/mat/start.html  

 

Thanks for reading this far and we are looking forward to your participation.

 

 

The study has been approved by the University of Bath Psychology Research Ethics Committee and has received some very useful input from a group of AVEN members. The AVEN PT approved it for being posted on the forum. If you have any questions or comments about the study you can contact the researchers via meike.scheller@abdn.ac.uk 

 

 

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PS: Sorry for posting this here - if there is a chance for a Mod to move this to the Research Announcement Section, that would be fantastic. Unfortunately, I have no permission to post there myself. 

[Ashmedai]

@henshin has this been cleared by you guys yet?

[kelico]

This study has been approved by the Project Team.

 

kelico

PT

[brandon7s]

Just finished the survey. Note that question 3, where it asks you to fill explanation after question 2, is required to be filled out even if "Yes" is the selected answer.

[MScheller]

Hi brandon7s, thank you so much for taking part in our study : ) 

 

With question 2, do you mean this one?: Is your gender identity the same as the sex you were assigned at birth?  

 

The box should only appear conditionally, so only when you click "no". If it still opened for you when you clicked "yes" this must be a glitch (the joy of online studies, where different OSs, browsers, etc cause unexpected changes from what we told the program to do). I'm sorry if this happened to you and caused confusion. In any case, thank you for flagging this up - it will be useful for us when we analyze the data.

 

If this should happen again to anyone you can just type "N/A" or "same" into the box. 

 

 

[Anthracite_Impreza]

I'm not blaming anyone, I'm not expecting anything to alter in this survey at least, but I was happy to complete this survey like so many others and yet again couldn't answer a single question. I only participate in the hope one day we objectums (oriented towards "objects") may be recognised so we can feel less like anomalies (like the entire ace community I assume), but I continue to be disappointed. I am asexual but not aromantic, but not represented anywhere so far because I'm only attracted to machines.

 

Since you seem to genuinely care and be serious, just thought I'd actually say something rather than clicking back like I usually do with a sigh.

[Tunhope]

found it difficult to rate the faces in terms of attractiveness as the expressions were so serious or fierce. I suppose that it meant that it was a sort of even playing field, but expression affects my perception of attractiveness. Smiles are nice.

[Morays]

1 hour ago, Tunhope said:

found it difficult to rate the faces in terms of attractiveness as the expressions were so serious or fierce. I suppose that it meant that it was a sort of even playing field, but expression affects my perception of attractiveness. Smiles are nice.

I found this to be the case too. I'm very drawn to people who smile, and find it off-putting when people are stern or unreadable. It might be interesting to do an equivalent study with all smiling faces, though I suppose it'd be much harder to get models to smile in a uniform way.

[MScheller]

 

20 hours ago, Anthracite_Impreza said:

I'm not blaming anyone, I'm not expecting anything to alter in this survey at least, but I was happy to complete this survey like so many others and yet again couldn't answer a single question. I only participate in the hope one day we objectums (oriented towards "objects") may be recognised so we can feel less like anomalies (like the entire ace community I assume), but I continue to be disappointed. I am asexual but not aromantic, but not represented anywhere so far because I'm only attracted to machines.

 

Since you seem to genuinely care and be serious, just thought I'd actually say something rather than clicking back like I usually do with a sigh.

Hi Anthracite_Impreza,

 

I'm very sorry to disappoint you with this, given we explicitly stated that the study is trying to be inclusive of many different orientations. Please be assured that, by far, this does not mean that we (and many other researchers) are not interested in your opinion. One reason why many researchers use rather strict inclusion criteria is that, with quantitative studies like this one, we need a group that is big enough to be analysed (see also "Who can take part" in my my survey post). This is often the reason why groups with specific characteristics that are comparably 'rare' or don't have a clear platform where they can engage with research, are not directly included in the researcher's design choices . 

 

I have to admit that I am not very familiar with the research into objectum sexuality, so I cannot give you any concrete recommendations. However, if you have a look into some published studies on this orientation (see link below) you might find which researchers are investigating objectum sexuality (the more recent push towards increasing the number of openly accessible papers will hopefully make this easier). On their University or lab webpages, you might be able to find open studies that are specifically looking for you  

https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&as_vis=1&q=Objectum+sexuality&btnG=  

 

In any case - it's great to see/read that you and many others here are so keen to help with research and I'd like to thank you for raising this point

 

[MScheller]

20 hours ago, Tunhope said:

found it difficult to rate the faces in terms of attractiveness as the expressions were so serious or fierce. I suppose that it meant that it was a sort of even playing field, but expression affects my perception of attractiveness. Smiles are nice.

 

19 hours ago, SocialMorays said:

I found this to be the case too. I'm very drawn to people who smile, and find it off-putting when people are stern or unreadable. It might be interesting to do an equivalent study with all smiling faces, though I suppose it'd be much harder to get models to smile in a uniform way.

Hi both,

thanks so much for taking part in the study!

Cool that you mention this. Indeed, there is quite a bit of research that shows how attractiveness is linked to emotion expression (specifically smiling)  So since we already know quite a fair bit about this, we wanted to compare the facial attractiveness independently of emotional expression - on a similar playing field so to say. This is the reason they all look similarly neutral. Interestingly, even when people have a fairly neutral expression, we often still find some more attractive than others. But why? - this we want to find out

 

[LillyFrog]

On 12/2/2020 at 12:51 PM, MScheller said:

 

Hi both,

thanks so much for taking part in the study!

Cool that you mention this. Indeed, there is quite a bit of research that shows how attractiveness is linked to emotion expression (specifically smiling)  So since we already know quite a fair bit about this, we wanted to compare the facial attractiveness independently of emotional expression - on a similar playing field so to say. This is the reason they all look similarly neutral. Interestingly, even when people have a fairly neutral expression, we often still find some more attractive than others. But why? - this we want to find out

 

In the absence of smiles/expressions and hair, I think it becomes solely about proportion and symmetry. However, I found myself paying much more attention to things like eyebrow shape and acne to try and differentiate. 

[brandon7s]

On 12/1/2020 at 11:09 AM, MScheller said:

Hi brandon7s, thank you so much for taking part in our study : ) 

 

With question 2, do you mean this one?: Is your gender identity the same as the sex you were assigned at birth?  

 

The box should only appear conditionally, so only when you click "no". If it still opened for you when you clicked "yes" this must be a glitch (the joy of online studies, where different OSs, browsers, etc cause unexpected changes from what we told the program to do). I'm sorry if this happened to you and caused confusion. In any case, thank you for flagging this up - it will be useful for us when we analyze the data.

 

If this should happen again to anyone you can just type "N/A" or "same" into the box. 

 

 

Yep, that's the question. I figured it might just be a quirky browser glitch, I'm on the latest version of Firefox (v83.0) and didn't bother trying it with a different browser since I did as you suggest and simply entered "same", or something like that. 🙂

[Guest]

On 12/1/2020 at 8:43 PM, Tunhope said:

found it difficult to rate the faces in terms of attractiveness as the expressions were so serious or fierce. I suppose that it meant that it was a sort of even playing field, but expression affects my perception of attractiveness. Smiles are nice.

Totally agree.  Really off-putting.

[Guest]

On 12/2/2020 at 5:51 PM, MScheller said:

 

Hi both,

thanks so much for taking part in the study!

Cool that you mention this. Indeed, there is quite a bit of research that shows how attractiveness is linked to emotion expression (specifically smiling)  So since we already know quite a fair bit about this, we wanted to compare the facial attractiveness independently of emotional expression - on a similar playing field so to say. This is the reason they all look similarly neutral. Interestingly, even when people have a fairly neutral expression, we often still find some more attractive than others. But why? - this we want to find out

 

I would have happily rated them all 1 - I had to work really hard to vary my ratings for the sake of feedback.

[Rhyn Corinn]

On 12/1/2020 at 1:27 PM, Anthracite_Impreza said:

I'm not blaming anyone, I'm not expecting anything to alter in this survey at least, but I was happy to complete this survey like so many others and yet again couldn't answer a single question. I only participate in the hope one day we objectums (oriented towards "objects") may be recognised so we can feel less like anomalies (like the entire ace community I assume), but I continue to be disappointed. I am asexual but not aromantic, but not represented anywhere so far because I'm only attracted to machines.

 

Since you seem to genuinely care and be serious, just thought I'd actually say something rather than clicking back like I usually do with a sigh.

Also how I feel with my complicated "whatever-it-is" identity that I still don't have an official label for. I don't really know how to fix that since it's so unusual and specific that I can't seem to find anyone else who quite fits it, but alas...I just wish I could be open about who I am without having to write an essay explaining my feelings, but I don't see that happening anytime soon...

[VanishingLady]

I started on this, but the demographic questions  - how are you going to have North American as a nationality (which technically - there are separate nations on this continent) yet the only way to identify being Black is Afro-Caribbean? Not even close to accurate and the rest of the answers weren't that great. Certainly gives a meaning to the Other. Call it quibbling if you want, but if you do this with the basic questions, I am leery of everything else.

 

Nope. Just. Nope.

[andever]

I filled this out - my feedback (which I also mentioned in the form itself) is that when it asks for what is important for me in a partner, it's only possible to answer in regards to each trait on a scale between I don't care either way ("1-Uninportant") or yes I want them to have this trait ("7 - important")... But if I care very much about them NOT having the asked for trait - say that it is very important for me that my partner has a lot of sexual experience, or that they do NOT desire a family a children - there's just no way to get that across, which is frustrating...?

[MScheller]

STUDY UPDATE

 

Hi all,

we would like to thank everyone that has taken part in this study and provided so much valuable feedback! 

We have been very positively surprised by the community openness to research, positive as well as critical feeback, and support in the design. For anyone that is interested in the final results, you can find the published (open access) paper here: 

 

The Role of Sexual and Romantic Attraction in Human Mate Preferences

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00224499.2023.2176811

 

With your support we have been able to show that the features we are interested in when looking for a partner do (partly) depend on sexual attraction, but partly also on romantic attraction. Surprisingly, the larger interest that men place on physical atractiveness (compared to women) does not seem to depend on the degree of sexual attraction, but rather on the degree of romantic attraction.

To clarify, we are looking at sex differences in partner preferences, rather than absolute partner preferences, here. Overall, people with lower sexual attraction also placed less importance on many partner characteristics. However, the relative differences in preferences between men and women are suggested to result from evolutionary pressures (i.e. sexual selection pressured men and women to care slightly more about different features), and likely reflects sex-specific predispositions rather than voluntary/conscious control. After all, we don't necessarily decide what features we are attracted to, but atraction happens rather automatically. 

 

I would also like to apologise to those people that have taken the questionnaire and whose data were not analysed/are not presented in this study, that is, individuals whose gender does not conform with their sex assigned at birth, and individuals who experience more attraction towards the same sex (homosexual/-romantic, bisexual/-romantic individuals). The reason is not that we are not interested in this data (quite the opposite is true), but the amount of responses we received from these groups were not enough to run reliable statistical analyses. For instance, there was a lot of heterogeneity/diversity in gender identity in those individuals that did not identify with their sex assigned at birth, leading to very small group sizes, that make it difficult to generalize the findings to others. At the same time, if we would have mixed up individuals with the strong opposite-sex (e.g., heterosexual/-romantic) and same-sex (e.g., homosexual/-romantic) attraction then the effects we see in each group might have been diluted or even cancelled each other out. So what researchers often have to do is focus on a sample with the same/similar characteristics in order to reduce variance that stems from factors that are not of primary interest to answer the research question. We hope to be able to find more individuals with those characteristics in order to run reliable analyses on, as we would be very interested in your/their experiences as well. 

Again, we would like to thank everyone for participating and engaging in this study and hope your experience with research participation stays positive 🌻 

[VanishingLady]

On 2/18/2023 at 5:34 PM, MScheller said:

STUDY UPDATE

 

Hi all,

we would like to thank everyone that has taken part in this study and provided so much valuable feedback! 

We have been very positively surprised by the community openness to research, positive as well as critical feeback, and support in the design. For anyone that is interested in the final results, you can find the published (open access) paper here: 

 

The Role of Sexual and Romantic Attraction in Human Mate Preferences

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00224499.2023.2176811

 

With your support we have been able to show that the features we are interested in when looking for a partner do (partly) depend on sexual attraction, but partly also on romantic attraction. Surprisingly, the larger interest that men place on physical atractiveness (compared to women) does not seem to depend on the degree of sexual attraction, but rather on the degree of romantic attraction.

To clarify, we are looking at sex differences in partner preferences, rather than absolute partner preferences, here. Overall, people with lower sexual attraction also placed less importance on many partner characteristics. However, the relative differences in preferences between men and women are suggested to result from evolutionary pressures (i.e. sexual selection pressured men and women to care slightly more about different features), and likely reflects sex-specific predispositions rather than voluntary/conscious control. After all, we don't necessarily decide what features we are attracted to, but atraction happens rather automatically. 

 

I would also like to apologise to those people that have taken the questionnaire and whose data were not analysed/are not presented in this study, that is, individuals whose gender does not conform with their sex assigned at birth, and individuals who experience more attraction towards the same sex (homosexual/-romantic, bisexual/-romantic individuals). The reason is not that we are not interested in this data (quite the opposite is true), but the amount of responses we received from these groups were not enough to run reliable statistical analyses. For instance, there was a lot of heterogeneity/diversity in gender identity in those individuals that did not identify with their sex assigned at birth, leading to very small group sizes, that make it difficult to generalize the findings to others. At the same time, if we would have mixed up individuals with the strong opposite-sex (e.g., heterosexual/-romantic) and same-sex (e.g., homosexual/-romantic) attraction then the effects we see in each group might have been diluted or even cancelled each other out. So what researchers often have to do is focus on a sample with the same/similar characteristics in order to reduce variance that stems from factors that are not of primary interest to answer the research question. We hope to be able to find more individuals with those characteristics in order to run reliable analyses on, as we would be very interested in your/their experiences as well. 

Again, we would like to thank everyone for participating and engaging in this study and hope your experience with research participation stays positive 🌻 

And yet you obviously did not address my stated concern for the demographics re RACE and NATIONALITY. It just seems yet another "we only care about White asexuals" "study". Not all Black people in North America (Canada, US, Mexico, Caribbean nations) are Afro-Caribbean. So your survey alienated not just myself, but any Black participant who doesn't fit the criteria. I expressed this in 2021 and zero response. Congratulations, your actions have meant that an ace of my or similar demographic will not be participating in any further "studies" because I do not trust I'll be even considered/counted. Which I suspect was the point.

 

Don't bother to respond to me, it's too late. Just know that I won't be wasting further time addressing you and your flaws here.

[kelico]

As this study has been finished, the thread is now closed for further responses. Thank you to everyone that participated!