Fridae

According to a new study by English psychiatrists that is guaranteed to ruffle some feathers, researchers Drs Qazi Rahman and Glenn Wilson from the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College, University of London, have concluded that gay men think like heterosexual women while lesbians were more aligned with straight men.

The study results, which was published in the January issue of Neuropsychology, reveals that gay men excelled at mental tasks which women generally perform better than men, but were not so good at tasks traditionally seen as "male" while lesbians fared as badly as heterosexual men in a test geared to women.

The sample comprised 60 gay men, 60 lesbians, 60 straight men and 60 straight women.

The researchers also found that gay men performed less well than heterosexual men but matched the ability of women when they conducted a series of neurocognitive tests of spatial skill - the ability to mentally reposition shapes and objects and judge the orientation of lines which helps in parking cars and reading maps.

Gay men however performed better than heterosexuals and as well as women at remembering the locations of objects in an array.

In several language tests, traditionally a female strong point, gay men performed as well as heterosexual women while lesbians performed the tests as poorly as straight men.

From the findings, the researchers believe that the traits seem to be "hard-wired" into the brain by varying levels of exposure to the male hormone testosterone before birth and may help explain why gay men and lesbians often suffer mental health problems quite different from those of heterosexuals.

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Dr Rahman said: "The fact that gay men and lesbians show cross-sex shifts in their brain functioning might also be related, partly, to the cross-sex shifts in their presentation of certain mental health problems in gay men, such as higher levels of anxiety disorders, depression and eating disorders usually found in women.

"Unravelling variations among groups of people in brain function is becoming an important area for research in human mental health, and a thorough scientific understanding of the biological and social factors which shape human sexual orientation is necessary so we can begin to tackle the mental health problems that gay men and lesbians may suffer from."

The scientists also found that gay men and lesbians both had longer ring fingers relative to their index fingers, which indicates a prenatal exposure to higher than normal levels of testosterone, than straight men and women.

The findings supported the idea that high, not low, testosterone levels in men produce shifts in sexual preference, but the evidence suggested that the testosterone levels involved were not high enough to be damaging - indicating that homosexuality was a normal biological phenomenon, and not the result of biological fault.