Beate Dombert

How Common is Men's Self-Reported Sexual Interest in Prepubescent Children?

Consistent evidence exists for sexual interest in children in nonclinical/nonforensic male populations. However, prevalences for community mens self-reported sexual interest in children have been based on indiscriminate definitions including postpubescent individuals, age-restricted samples, and/or small convenience samples. The present research assessed mens self-reported sexual interest in children (including child prostitution and child sex tourism) on the community level and examined the link between strictly defined sexual fantasies and behaviors involving prepubescent children. In an online survey of 8,718 German men, 4.1% reported sexual fantasies involving prepubescent children, 3.2% reported sexual offending against prepubescent children, and 0.1% reported a pedophilic sexual preference. Sexual fantasies involving prepubescent children were positively related to sexual offending against prepubescent children. Sexual interest in children was associated with subjectively perceived need for therapeutic help. In contrast to findings from forensic samples, men who reported child pornography use exclusively were identified as a subgroup differing from contact sexual offenders against prepubescent children and men who reported both child pornography use and contact sexual offenses against prepubescent children. The empirical link between child-related sexual fantasies and sexual victimization of prepubescent children and high levels of subjective distress from this inclination underscore the importance of evidence-based child sexual abuse prevention approaches in the community. Findings are discussed in terms of their relation to pedophilic disorder.

Functional Cortical and Subcortical Abnormalities in Pedophilia: A Combined Study Using a Choice Reaction Time Task and fMRI

INTRODUCTION Pedophiles show sexual interest in prepubescent children but not in adults. Research into the neurofunctional mechanisms of paraphilias has gathered momentum over the last years. AIM To elucidate the underlying neural processing of sexual interest among pedophiles and to highlight the differences in comparison with nonparaphilic sexual interest in adults. METHODS Nine pedophilic patients and 11 nonpedophilic control subjects underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while viewing pictures of nude (prepubescents, pubescents, and adults) and neutral content, as well as performing a concomitant choice reaction time task (CRTT). MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Brain blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) signals and response latencies in the CRTT during exposure to each picture category. RESULTS Analysis of behavioral data showed group differences in reaction times regarding prepubescent and adult but not pubescent stimuli. During stimulation with pictures displaying nude prepubescents, pedophiles showed increased BOLD response in brain areas known to be involved in processing of visual sexual stimuli. Comparison of pedophilic patients with the control group discovered differences in BOLD responses with respect to prepubescent and adult but not to pubescent stimuli. Differential effects in particular occurred in the cingulate gyrus and insular region. CONCLUSIONS The brain response of pedophiles to visual sexual stimulation by images of nude prepubescents is comparable with previously described neural patterns of sexual processing in nonpedophilic human males evoked by visual stimuli depicting nude adults. Nevertheless, group differences found in the cingulate gyrus and the insular region suggest an important role of these brain areas in pedophilic sexual interest. Furthermore, combining attention-based methods like CRTT with fMRI may be a viable option for future diagnostic procedures regarding pedophilia.

Judgment of age and attractiveness in a paired comparison task: Testing a picture set developed for diagnosing paedophilia

Purpose. The Not-Real-People picture set serves as stimulus material for assessing paedophilic sexual interest. The pictures were generated according to five stages of sexual maturation from infancy to adulthood. While experts seem to be able to discern between the pictures based on maturity levels for a nude variant of the stimuli, it remained unclear whether lay persons would be able to reliably distinguish between picture of clothed individuals from various maturity levels. Methods. Heterosexual university students (52 females, 50 males) participated in a paired comparison task, deciding which of the persons shown on two pictures was younger and which one was more attractive. Additionally, reaction times were recorded. Results. Both male and female judges were able to differentiate between stimuli from the opposite sex with regard to age: the perception of the stages of pubertal development conformed to a measurement on a ratio scale. Similarly, the decisions on attractiveness of the categories were in accordance with a ratio scale. Male participants favoured adolescent and adult female stimuli. Contrary to expectation, female participants did not show a preference for any single age category. Conclusions. The stimuli appear suitable for diagnostic purposes. The participants’ decisions reflect the inherent maturity levels of the persons depicted. Reaction times in the paired comparison paradigm increase with task difficulty (i.e., similitude of pictures). The implications for indirect measures of sexual interest, based on reaction times, are discussed.

The virtual people set: developing computer-generated stimuli for the assessment of pedophilic sexual interest.

The implicit assessment of pedophilic sexual interest through viewing-time methods necessitates visual stimuli. There are grave ethical and legal concerns against using pictures of real children, however. The present report is a summary of findings on a new set of 108 computer-generated stimuli. The images vary in terms of gender (female/male), explicitness (naked/clothed), and physical maturity (prepubescent, pubescent, and adult) of the persons depicted. A series of three studies tested the internal and external validity of the picture set. Studies 1 and 2 yielded good-to-high estimates of observer agreement with regard to stimulus maturity levels by two methods (categorization and paired comparison). Study 3 extended these findings with regard to judgments made by convicted child sexual offenders.

Identifying Pedophilic Interest in Sex Offenders Against Children With the Indirect Choice Reaction Time Task

Pedophilia – a disorder of sexual preference with primary sexual interest in prepubescent children – is forensically relevant yet difficult to detect using self-report methods. The present study evaluated the criterion validity of the Choice Reaction Time (CRT) task to differentiate between a sample of child sex offenders with a presumably high rate of pedophilic individuals and three control groups (other sex offenders, non-sex offenders, and community controls, all male; N = 233). The CRT task required locating a dot superimposed on images depicting men, women, girls, or boys and scrambled pictures as quickly as possible. We used two picture sets, the Not Real People (NRP) set and the Virtual People Set (VPS). We predicted sexually relevant pictures to elicit longer reaction times in interaction with the participant group. Both CRTs showed main effects of stimulus explicitness and preferred stimulus gender. The CRT-NRP also yielded an interaction effect of participant group and stimulus maturity while the CRT-VPS showed a tendency in this direction. The overall effect size was moderate. Results offer support for the usefulness of the CRT task in forensic assessment of child sex offenders.

Differentiating sexual preference in men: using dual task rapid serial visual presentation task

Cognition research suggests that allocating attention resources to evolutionarily relevant stimuli is facilitated suggesting that sexual stimuli interfere with human information processing. In a group of gay (n = 13) and straight men (n = 13) recruited in Finland, Germany and Italy, we investigated if and how sexually relevant visual stimuli affect information processing of both a target one (T1) and a subsequent target two (T2) in a dual target rapid serial visual presentation procedure. We hypothesized that: (1) due to the attentional blink (AB) phenomenon, the accuracy of reporting of T2 would decrease when following accurately identified sexually preferred T1 compared to accurately identified non-sexually preferred T1; 2) due to the pop out effect, the accuracy of reporting of T1 and T2 would be relatively increased when T1 and T2 were sexually preferred by the participants compared to when they were not. Our findings did not support hypothesis 1 but supported hypothesis 2. We further found that the pop out effect had a good capacity to differentiate sexual preference between the groups of gay and straight men. We conclude that dual target rapid serial visual presentation can be used as an attention-based measurement to differentiate sexual preference in men. Limitations and the applicability in the field of measuring sexual preference were discussed.

Using a Dual-Target Rapid Serial Visual Presentation Task (RSVP) as an Attention-Based Measurement Procedure of Sexual Preference: Is it Possible to Fake?

As faking threatens the validity of sexual preference measurements in forensic contexts, we investigated in an analogue study the fakeability of the dual-target Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP), an attention-based measurement procedure. In the dual-target RSVP, when observers attempt to detect two targets (T1 and T2) in a stream of stimuli presented in rapid succession, identification of T2 is impaired when it follows T1 within approximately 500 ms, a phenomenon called Attentional Blink (AB). Emotional stimuli result in an “emotion-induced blindness” or “attentional rubbernecking” effect: AB increases (detection of T2 decreases) when T1 is salient and decreases (detection of T2 íncreases) if T2 is salient or when participants are concurrently engaged in distracting mental activity. The participants were 9 gay men, 8 straight men, and 12 straight men with the last group instructed to fake their T2 responses assuming the expected response style of gay men when the T1 and T2 stimuli were pictures of nude and clothed men and women. We found differences in the reporting of both T1 and T2 between the gay men and the faking straight men as a function of the type of T1 resulting in good differentiation between the two groups (AUC = 0.78–0.92). The results suggest that the different patterns of reporting are in most explainable by a combination of the increase in cognitive load in the faking group and of the subtlety of the attentional effects of whether the stimuli were intrinsically of sexual interest to the participants. We conclude that the RSVP as an attention-based measurement procedure of sexual preference has a moderate resilience to faking. The generalizability of these findings to forensic contexts should be further explored.

Identifying deviant sexual interest in a sex offender sample using dual-target rapid serial visual presentation task

Abstract To investigate the dual-target rapid serial visual presentation (dtRSVP) task as a measure of deviant sexual interest (i.e. a sexual interest in children), we administered a dtRSVP with gender- and age-specific pictorial stimuli to child sex offenders (n = 69), other sex offenders (n = 43), non-sex offenders (n = 14), and community controls (n = 88). We hypothesized that (1) stimuli belonging to the preferred gender and age group presented as targets (both T1 and the subsequent T2) in the serial sequence would be more accurately detected than non-preferred stimuli and that (2) this increased detection would reduce the detection of targets later in the serial sequence (T2) due to an attentional blink. Our findings supported hypothesis 1 and partly supported hypothesis 2. Although we found group differences, individual indices based on detection rates did not allow for individual-level diagnostic categorization of participants.