Can We Measure Sexual Interest in Pedophiles Using a Sexual Distractor Task?

Abstract

Indirect measures of deviant sexual interest have yielded interesting and promising in the field of pedophilic interest. However, further research is needed. A lot of indirect measures are still at the developmental stage regarding clinical application. They do not reach appropriate psychometric criteria or are not yet sufficiently tested for susceptibility to manipulation or deception. Furthermore, for some paradigms, the exact mechanisms underlying the attentional processes are still under discussion. This study aimed to measure sexual interest under cognitive load. With this challenging active task subject's possibility to manipulate their response to the sexual stimuli should be lower than in easier tasks and in passive designs. Twenty-two pedophiles, seven forensic control subjects and 50 healthy men performed cognitive tasks. Simultaneously, sexually relevant and sexually non-relevant distractors were presented. Meanwhile, their cognitive performance and eye movements were assessed. As expected healthy subjects showed a certain impairment of cognitive performance when sexually relevant distractors were presented to them. They took significantly more time to look at sexual adult distractors than at sexual child distractors. In contrast, both forensic groups performed much poorer than the healthy control group without specificity for certain sexual distractors. While forensic control subjects tended to view adult stimuli longer than those of children, no differences were found for pedophiles. The age preference index for the fixation time differentiated moderately between pedophiles and non-pedophiles. Our design worked well with healthy subjects. Further studies should examine if an individual adaptation of the task difficulty could help to find the expected cognitive performance impairments of pedophiles and forensic subjects when they are presented with certain distractor categories.

Eye tracking and child sexual offenders: a systematic review

“…In the second study of Jordan et al. [ 45 ], paedophiles exhibited shortest fixation latencies towards sexual distractor compared to both control groups, but it was only significant compared with the forensic control group ( P = 0.042). Paedophiles differed from both control groups with longer relative fixation times to sexual distractor, but it was only significant compared to forensic controls ( P = 0.014).…”

“…The first and the second studies of Jordan et al. [ 44 , 45 ] compared three groups: 22 paedophiles, seven forensic inpatients and 50 healthy subjects. The third study by Jordan et al.…”

“…In the second study of Jordan et al. [ 45 ] stimuli are the same that in the previous study (pairs of three-dimensional cube figures and sexual distractor stimuli from Not-Real-People picture set). Subjects had to say if the two figures were identical or not.…”

“…Rotation stimuli and sexual distractor were showed in the same time. Fixation latency and fixation time were two dependent variables defined like in the previous study [ 45 ]. In this study, the procedure is a task-irrelevant indirect measures of sexual interest with unreal visual sexual stimuli.…”

Editor Note: Journal of Forensic Psychology (Volume 1 Issue 2)

“…Pedophilic disorder is a subtype of paraphilia where the patient experiences recurrent sexual interest on prepubescent children by persistent sexual urge, thoughts, fantasies or behavior. Jordan et al [4] in their research article measured the sexual interest under the cognitive load. Authors performed cognitive tests on 50 healthy men, seven forensic control subjects and twenty-two pedophiles by giving them sexually relevant and non-relevant distractors.…”