KQED News: Orlando Shooting Raises Questions About Internalized Homophobia and ViolenceJune 17, 2016 by Shannon

June 17, 2016 / By April Dembosky /

SDT article Parental autonomy support and discrepancies between implicit and explicit sexual identities… by SDT faculty Weinstein, Ryan, DeHaan, Przybylski, Legate & Ryan featured in KQED news on Orlando shooting.  Richard Ryan and William Ryan comment.

Ryan was one of the researchers who conducted a series of studies that found empirical evidence that fear, anxiety, or hostility toward gay and lesbian people on behalf of seemingly heterosexual people can grow from their own repressed same-sex desires.

“When people are trying to suppress something in themselves, they can find someone else who is expressing that attitude threatening,” said Richard Ryan, a psychology professor at the University of Rochester. “It’s kind of a transfer of self-loathing to loathing of other people who are expressing what you can’t.”

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