A new study conducted by university students in Italy suggests that people who hold homophobic principles and attitude, may in fact suffer from some psychological issues themselves.
Many people who have strong negative views about gay people also present a higher level of psychoticism and inappropriate coping mechanisms than those who are accepting of homosexuality. Now this doesn’t mean that homophobes are psychotic, just that psychoticism is a trait often times characterized by hostility and anger towards others who usually are different in some way.
However, lead researcher Emmanuele Jannini, an endocrinologist and medical sexologist at the University of Rome Tor Vergata, believes that homophobia and psychoticism are linked. “The study is opening a new research avenue, where the real disease to study is homophobia,” Jannini told Live Science.
While some say that homophobes are so because secretly or unconsciously, they harbor the same-sex desires, others say that homophobic people are truly averse to same-sex attraction. And while some external factors play an important role in people being this way; factors like: religiosity, culture, sensitivity to disgust, hyper-masculinity and misogyny, none however have addressed the mental health of homophobes.
This study was conducted on 551 Italian university students, ranging in age from 18 to 30, which had to fill out questionnaires about their levels of homophobia as well as their psychopathology, including levels of depression, anxiety and psychoticism.
These test subjects also had to answer questions about their attachment style. Whether they form a normal, healthy level of attachment with their partners or have problem with intimacy and later on become clingy and neurotic. Finally they were asked about their coping strategies and defense mechanisms. Either they regulate their emotions and don’t need other people’s validation or resort to passive aggression or denial of the problem.
The results of this survey has shown that people with a healthy attitude are also less likely to be homophobes. People with “fearful-avoidant” attachment styles, who tend to feel uncomfortable in close relationships with others, were significantly more homophobic than those who were secure with close relationships.
While homophobia finds itself more often in dysfunctional personalities, this is not the whole story. Homophobia is a “culture-induced disease,” Jannini said, so personality traits probably interplay with factors like religion and conservative values. The researchers are currently expanding the study to students in Albania, Jannini said. They’re also studying how the fear of not being “man enough“ might influence homophobic attitudes.
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