Men's, more than women's, sexual responses may include a coordination of several physiological indices in order to build their sexual arousal to relevant targets. Here, for the first time, genital arousal and pupil dilation to sexual stimuli were simultaneously assessed. These measures corresponded more strongly with each other, subjective sexual arousal, and self-reported sexual orientation in men than women. Bisexual arousal is more prevalent in women than men. We therefore predicted that if bisexual-identified men show bisexual arousal, the correspondence of their arousal indices would be more female-typical, thus weaker, than for other men. Homosexual women show more maletypical arousal than other women; hence, their correspondence of arousal indices should be stronger than for other women. Findings, albeit weak in effect, supported these predictions. Thus, if sex-specific patterns are reversed within one sex, they might affect more than one aspect of sexual arousal. Because pupillary responses reflected sexual orientation similar to genital responses, they offer a less invasive alternative for the measurement of sexual arousal.Keywords: sexual orientation, sex differences, pupil dilation, genital arousal Sexual Arousal: The Correspondence of Eyes and Genitals 3! Sexual Arousal: The Correspondence of Eyes and Genitals Although most men are genitally aroused to one sex that is consistent with their reported sexual orientation, women's sexual orientation is weakly reflected in their genital response because they are sexually aroused to both sexes (Chivers, Rieger, Latty, & Bailey, 2004; Chivers, Seto, & Blanchard, 2007; Rieger, Chivers, & Bailey, 2005).Sex-specific selection pressures might explain this sex difference. The majority of men have evolved to be strongly sexually oriented towards women, facilitating prompt sexual responses required for reproduction. Women may have evolved to be sexually responsive in these situations to avoid genital injury; these pressures might have been so strong that they evolved to respond to any sexual cue, including sexual stimuli depicting either sex (Bailey, 2009; Suschinsky & Lalumière, 2011).The congruence of various physiological reactions likely reflects the salience of orienting oneself to sexual stimuli (Safron et al., 2007). Thus, men's bodies might synchronize their genital responses with other psychological reactions to build sexual arousal to sexually desired targets. However, if women's, unlike men's, sexual responses have not evolved to orient to specific targets (Bailey, 2009), then their arousal system may not require a coordination of different physiological reactions towards these targets.Consistent with this hypothesis, genital response relates stronger in men than women to subjective sexual arousal to sexual stimuli (Chivers, Seto, Lalumiere, Laan, & Grimbos, 2010). If this sex difference in concordance is robust, other measures of sexual arousal should correspond more strongly in men than women with their genital and subjective responses.Sexu...

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), or cumulative childhood stress exposures, such as abuse, neglect, and household dysfunction, predict later health problems in both the exposed individuals and their offspring. One potential explanation suggests exposure to early adversity predicts epigenetic modification, especially DNA methylation (DNAm), linked to later health. Stress experienced preconception by mothers may associate with DNAm in the next generation. We hypothesized that fathers’ exposure to ACEs also associates with their offspring DNAm, which, to our knowledge, has not been previously explored. An epigenome‐wide association study (EWAS) of blood DNAm (n = 45) from 3‐month‐old infants was regressed onto fathers’ retrospective ACEs at multiple Cytosine‐phosphate‐Guanosine (CpG) sites to discover associations. This accounted for infants’ sex, age, ethnicity, cell type proportion, and genetic variability. Higher ACE scores associated with methylation values at eight CpGs. Post‐hoc analysis found no contribution of paternal education, income, marital status, and parental postpartum depression, but did with paternal smoking and BMI along with infant sleep latency. These same CpGs also contributed to the association between paternal ACEs and offspring attention problems at 3 years. Collectively, these findings suggested there were biological associations with paternal early life adversity and offspring DNAm in infancy, potentially affecting offspring later childhood outcomes.

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