Assessing the Implicit Beliefs of Sexual Offenders Using the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure

Abstract

Researchers have proposed that the cognitive distortions of sexual offenders are underpinned by a number of implicit cognitive processes termed implicit theories. Until recently, however, the implicit theory hypothesis has received little empirical support due to broader limitations with standard forensic assessment procedures. The current research aimed to determine whether a new assessment methodology, the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP), could provide further evidence for Ward and Keenan's (1999) children as sexual beings implicit theory. The results indicated that the IRAP was significantly more effective at identifying core implicit differences between sexual offenders against children and nonoffenders than a cognitive distortion questionnaire. Furthermore, although both groups demonstrated an overall response bias towards adults as sexual and children as nonsexual, this bias was significantly impaired in the sexual offender group. The findings are discussed in relation to previous implicit theory research and recommendations for the development of implicit methodologies are made.

Anxiety and avoidance in psychogenic nonepileptic seizures: The role of implicit and explicit anxiety

“…This can be done through the aggregation of many overt responses (e.g., key presses on computerized tasks), frequently under time pres-sure, and across various types of stimuli (e.g., words or pictures related to a targeted attribute) [42,43]. Studies using implicit measures have offered evidence for their convergent and discriminant validity in dif-ferent scenarios and groups [44,45],with researchtodate finding that implicit indices appear to be better than self-report or clinical judge-ment at predicting important clinical behaviors such as suicide at-tempts [46], substance misuse [47], and sexual offending [48].…”

“…Furthermore, research has indicated that the IRAP compares favorably with other implicit measures of individual differ-ences [53], is perhaps less susceptible to 'faking' or overt manipulation [54], and can target clinically relevant phenomena [48,55].…”

“…Participants were instructed to derive the correct response style for each block of trials but were not told which trials were considered to be consistent or inconsistent. To ensure under-standing of the task and minimize random responding, each participant was administered at least two practice blocks until they achieved an average response time of less than 3 s and an accuracy rating above 80% (in line with previous research [48]). …”

The Dominance of Associative Theorizing in Implicit Attitude Research: Propositional and Behavioral Alternatives

“…The IRAP effect has now been replicated across a growing number of domains, ranging from implicit social stereotyping (Dawson, Barnes-Holmes, gresswell, Hart, & gore, 2009), and experimentally induced evaluations (Hughes & Barnes-Holmes, 2011).…”

The IRAP Is Nonrelative but not Acontextual: Changes to the Contrast Category Influence Men’s Dehumanization of Women

“…Previous research using the IRAP often emphasized the task's ability to produce four separate bias scores (e.g., Dawson, Barnes-Holmes, Gresswell, Hart, & Gore, 2009;Drake et al, 2015;Nicholson, McCourt, & Barnes-Holmes, 2013;Rönspies et al, 2015), in contrast with the single overall bias score produced by other "relative" measures (e.g., the IAT). Specifically, whereas the IAT presents all four stimulus categories on each trial and assesses the relative bias for one pattern of category pairings over the other (e.g., categorizing "self with life and others with death" vs. "self with death and others with life": Nock et al, 2010), the IRAP presents individual stimulus category pairings separately across trials and provides separate bias scores for each (e.g., responding to "self-life", "self-death", "others-life", and "others-death" as being true vs. false across blocks : Hussey, Barnes-Holmes, & Booth, 2016).…”