Approach and Avoidance Tendencies Toward Picture Stimuli of (Pre-)Pubescent Children and Adults: An Investigation in Pedophilic and Nonpedophilic Samples

Abstract

The presence of pedophilic sexual interests is considered of high importance for predicting recidivism among individuals who have committed sexual offenses. However, objective and valid assessment methods that are robust against confounding issues such as cognitive capacity and manipulation are sparse. We applied the Approach-Avoidance Task (AAT) for detecting sexual interests in 38 pedophilic men (18 primarily attracted to boys) and 27 male nonpedophilic (11 gay) participants. The AAT relies on automatic approach and avoidance tendencies, independent of cognitive abilities such as memory capacity and intelligence. Approach-avoidance tendencies toward stimuli depicting seminude prepubescent boys and girls as well as men and women are reported. The results were consistent with previous research on the utility of the AAT: Except for pedophiles attracted to girls, the mean AAT scores (approach minus avoidance reaction time for each stimulus category) were positive only for stimuli of the preferred category. A multivariate binary logistic regression approach revealed 80% overall accuracy in differentiating pedophilic from nonpedophilic participants.

Sexual attraction modulates interpersonal distance and approach-avoidance movements towards virtual agents in males

“…The AAT reliably detected effects on different sets of measurements and converged with the results in the IPD Experiment. Furthermore, we found effects on a range of dependent variables, which adds credibility to the smaller effects found in previous AAT studies [7,10]. These results indicate that the AAT in combination with the IPD-paradigm may be more ecologically valid than alternative approaches used in previous studies (e. g., using 2D-stimuli and arm-movements).…”

“…Their findings suggested a larger compatibility effect for sexually arousing stimuli compared to art stimuli. This approach-effect towards sexually relevant stimuli has been partly replicated in (child) sexual offenders [10] and has been linked to sexual excitation and arousal among gynophilic men [7,13]. However, the supposed interaction of movement direction and sexual orientation towards the target stimulus did not surface consistently [7,10].…”

“…We chose to sample andro-and gynophilic male subjects for two reasons: First, reactions towards visual sexual stimuli are more attenuated in male as compared to female subjects [31], thus males should produce larger effects. Second, sex research using the AAT has mostly relied on male subjects [7,10,12].…”

“…Variants of this Approach-Avoidance Task (AAT) have been implemented in different contexts including sex research [7,[9][10][11]. For example, Hofmann, Friese [12] presented sexual and artistic stimuli to gynophilic men.…”

“…We hold that this is necessary as both paradigms have different serious shortcomings, which make conclusions based on just one paradigm problematic. The former approach (AAT) suffers from a lack of ecological validity, the latter approach (IPD) is often plagued by confounding variables and a limited number of sexually relevant stimuli [10,17]. We sought to address these drawbacks by using a dual-paradigm virtual-reality approach.…”