Malvina Skorska

Centre for Addiction and Mental Health · Child & Youth Psychiatry

Gender differences in appraisals of first intercourse are among the largest in sexuality research, with women indicating less satisfying "sexual debuts" than men. Dispositional or "actor-level" explanations for this gender gap are pervasive, yet research has largely examined heterosexual debuts in which actor gender and partner gender are confounde...

Background: Engaging patients, families, caregivers, and the community (PFCCs) throughout the research cycle ensures that research is meaningful for the target population. Although tools have been developed to promote PFCC engagement, many are lengthy, complex, and lack recommended behaviours. This study evaluated the sensibility of an infographic...

Sexual orientation is a core aspect of human experience and understanding its development is fundamental to psychology as a scientific discipline. Biological perspectives have played an important role in helping to uncover the processes that contribute to sexual orientation development. Research in this field has relied on a variety of populations,...

Sexual orientation is a core aspect of human experience and understanding its development is fundamental to psychology as a scientific discipline. Biological perspectives have played an important role in uncovering the processes that contribute to sexual orientation development. Research in this field has relied on a variety of populations, includi...

Background: A younger age at sexual intercourse has frequently been linked to adverse sexual health outcomes. Yet, little is known about its associations with healthy sexual function, and less still about the timing of pre-coital sexual debuts and adult sexual health. Aim: We examined associations between an earlier sexual debut and subsequent s...

Gender dysphoria (GD) is characterized by distress due to an incongruence between experienced gender and sex assigned at birth. Brain functional connectivity in adolescents who experience GD may be associated with experienced gender (vs. assigned sex) and/or brain networks implicated in own-body perception. Furthermore, sexual orientation may be re...

The fraternal birth order effect (FBOE) is the repeated finding that older brothers increase the odds of homosexuality in later-born males. It has been our working assumption, based on the majority of previous studies, that a similar FBOE does not occur in females. In an elaborate quantitative review posted last year to a preprint server, Vilsmeier...

Human asexuality has been defined as a lack of sexual attraction to others, although its nature is not well understood. Asexual men's genital and subjective sexual arousal patterns were compared to sexual men's to better understand asexual men's sexual response patterns. Using a penile plethysmograph to measure genital arousal, 20 asexual, 27 heter...

Gender differences in experience of first intercourse are among the largest in sexuality research, with women recalling less pleasure and satisfaction than men. This "enjoyment gap" has not been considered in explanations of gender differences in sexual desire. Yet, reinforcement and incentive learning features prominently in recent models of women...

The biodevelopment of psychological sex differentiation is putatively reflected in several anthropometrics. We examined eight anthropometrics in 1404 Thai participants varying in sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity/expression: heterosexual men and women, gay men, lesbian women, bisexual women, sao praphet song (transgender birth-assigned m...

Neurohormonal theory argues that organizational effects of hormone exposure influence sexual orientation and gender identity, as well as sex differences in visuospatial cognition. This study examined mental rotation task (MRT) performance in a diverse Thai sample (N = 980). Thai culture has several third genders: individuals assigned male at birth...

Gender dysphoria (GD) is characterized by distress due to an incongruence between experienced gender and sex assigned at birth. Sex-differentiated brain regions are hypothesized to reflect the experienced gender in GD and may play a role in sexual orientation development. Magnetic resonance brain images were acquired from 16 GD adolescents assigned...

Background: Engaging patients, their families, caregivers and the community (PFCCs) throughout the research cycle provides many benefits of ensuring that research is meaningful for the population it is meant to benefit. Several engagement tools, guidelines, and recommendations have been developed to guide researchers in engaging PFCCs. However, man...

Previous research has examined handedness and birth order to inform sexual orientation and gender identity/role expression development; however, sexual orientation and gender identity/role expression have rarely been disentangled to provide a more nuanced perspective. In Thailand, we investigated sexual orientation and gender identity simultaneousl...

Human same-sex sexual attraction is considered to be an evolutionary paradox. This paradox rests on same-sex attracted individuals having lowered direct reproduction, indicating reduced direct fitness of genes that influence same-sex attraction. Yet, relatively few empirical studies have examined the relation between same-sex sexual attraction and...

Androphilia refers to sexual attraction toward adult males. Androphilic males’ female genetic relatives might offset the fitness cost of androphilia by having elevated numbers of offspring. Increased attractiveness relative to other women may enable these females to marry up the social hierarchy, providing greater access to resources to support mor...

The fraternal birth order (FBO) effect related to men’s sexual orientation refers to the finding that the number of older brothers that a man has increases his chance of being androphilic. The FBO effect has generally been well replicated in diverse samples; one instance of non-replication was by Francis (2008) using Waves I and III of the Add Heal...

We review research supporting biological mechanisms in the development of sexual orientation. This research includes studies on neural correlates, prenatal hormones and related physical/behavioral correlates, genetics, and the fraternal birth order effect (FBOE). These studies, taken together, have provided substantial support for biological influe...

There is considerable debate about the potential harmful impacts of pornography exposure and viewing among men. The current literature suggests that heterosexual men’s use of pornography may be associated with negative attitudes and behaviour toward women. However, little research has experimentally examined exposure to different types of nonviolen...

Developmental theories of sexual orientation largely center on sexual differentiation processes. One hypothesis is that low prenatal androgens are associated with same-sex attraction in men. Using indirect measures of androgens (e.g., height, weight, pubertal onset), this hypothesis has received mixed support, suggesting there may be subgroups of g...

Previous clinical research on children who experience gender dysphoria has demonstrated links between marked childhood gender variant behaviour and several variables thought to provide a window on biological processes affecting brain sexual differentiation during the pre-/perinatal period. These variables include handedness, birth order, and birth...

We conducted a direct test of an immunological explanation of the finding that gay men have a greater number of older brothers than do heterosexual men. This explanation posits that some mothers develop antibodies against a Y-linked protein important in male brain development, and that this effect becomes increasingly likely with each male gestatio...

A number of studies have indicated that gay men tend to be shorter, on average, than heterosexual men. Less evidence exists that lesbian women are taller, on average, than heterosexual women. The most popular explanation of the association between sexual orientation and height involves prenatal factors, such that, for example, gay men may have been...

Recent findings suggest that there may be a maternal immune response underpinning the etiology of sexual orientation of gay male only-children. This maternal immune response appears to be distinct from that which is purported to explain the classic fraternal birth order effect found in studies of male sexual orientation. We tested two predictions r...

Background: Some evidence suggests that prenatal androgens influence both handedness and sexual orientation. This study sought to clarify how androgens, handedness, and sexual orientation are interrelated. Methods: Data were obtained from large samples of students enrolled at universities in Malaysia and the US, including self-reported informati...

**I have uploaded a corrected version of the article on March 16, 2016. A correction was made with the labels "androphilic" and "gynephilic in the abstract and methods. Studies that have used mostly self-reported height have found that androphilic men and women are shorter than gynephilic men and women, respectively. This study examined whether a...

Research into the various influences on sexual orientation development has increased over the past 15–30 years. In this article, the key findings of the research into the biological influences on sexual orientation development are discussed. Specifically, biological influences are discussed in relation to prenatal hormones, genetics, the brain, the...

Biological models have typically framed sexual orientation in terms of effects of variation in fetal androgen signaling on sexual differentiation, although other biological models exist. Despite marked sex differences in facial structure, the relationship between sexual orientation and facial structure is understudied. A total of 52 lesbian women,...

Psychological essentialism, the perception that groups possess inherent properties binding them and differentiating them from others, is theoretically relevant to predicting prejudice. Recent developments isolate two key dimensions: essentialistic entitativity (EE; groups as unitary, whole, entity-like) and essentialistic naturalness (EN; groups as...