Dr. Gerulf Rieger

Gerulf Rieger obtained a MSc in Biological Anthropology from the University of Zurich in Switzerland and a PhD in Personality Psychology from Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois. Gerulf had a teaching position at Northwestern University and was a research fellow at Cornell University before joining the University of Essex. He is now an Associate Professor at Webster Vienna Private University.

Research Interests

Gerulf Rieger's research has focused on sexual orientation: how it develops, how it is organized and how it affects a person’s life.  He has used childhood videos and photographs to examine how behavioral signals of early masculinity-femininity predict adult sexual orientation. He has studied identical twins with discordant sexual orientations to quantify the non-genetic impact on their development. Furthermore, Gerulf Rieger researches genital arousal to gather information on sex differences that self-report could never reveal. In women bisexual arousal is common across sexual orientations, whereas in men bisexual arousal is possible, but rare. His studies have broad relevance for understanding the development of differences between and within the sexes, and for how people perceive themselves and others.