Delays in attentional processing when viewing sexual imagery: The development and comparison of two measures

Abstract

Purpose. Critically important to effectively treating and managing sexual offending is the identification or validation of an offender's deviant sexual interests as the nature of their sexual interests is what demarcates repetitive sexual offenders from nonoffenders and lower risk offenders. As an alternative or verification to self-report or phallometric measures, focus has turned to attention-based measures. These measures assess sexual content-induced delay (SCID), a specific form of attentional bias associated with preferred sexual content (images or text). Viewing time (VT) and choice reaction time (CRT) were developed and utilized to assess sexual interest via SCID (Geer & Bellard, 1996) and examine the measures' clinical utility via estimates of sensitivity and specificity.Method. Participants were 44 youth non-sexual offenders, 60 university students, and 22 adult sexual offenders. Differences between groups were examined on various subscores and receiver operator characteristic curves provided information on clinical utility.Results. The VT and CRT measures produced subtest scores with high reliability in all three samples. There were significant differences in VT between the adult sexual offenders and the youth non-sexual offenders, but not between the youth non-sexual offenders and the university students. Some of the VT subtests demonstrated good clinical utility in their ability to differentiate adult heterosexual sexual offenders from non-sexual offenders (e.g., area under the curve (AUC) = 0.87 female mature images, 0.88 male child images). Interestingly, the VT and CRT measures provided significantly different results.

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

“…Interestingly, additional analysis showed that the longer subjects viewed sexual distractors, the longer the RT in the mental rotation task, if an adult sexual distractor was presented (r=0.513, p<0.001). This result supports the theory of the SCID at the eye movement level [63]. The association of RT in our cognitive task and time of watching the sexually relevant distractors, i.e., the relative fixation time, indicates that the emotional state (elicited by viewing sexually relevant stimuli) could be the cause of the attentional bias and the subsequent delayed task processing.…”

The cognitive distortions of child molesters are in need of treatment

“…Novel methods attempting to examine cognitions and/or cognitive components of deviant sexual interest include Implicit Association Tests (Banse, Schmidt, & Clarbour, 2010;Brown, Gray, & Snowden, 2009;Gray, Brown, MacCulloch, Smith, & Snowden, 2005;Mihailides, Devilly, & Ward, 2004;Nunes, Firestone, & Baldwin, 2007;Ó Ciardha & Gormley, 2009;Steffens, Yundina, & Panning, 2008), choice reaction time tests (Giotakos, 2005;Gress, 2008;Mokros, Dombert, Osterheider, Zappalà, & Santtila, 2010), modified Stroop tasks (Ó Ciardha & Gormley, in press;Price & Hanson, 2007;Smith & Waterman, 2004), rapid serial visual presentation tasks Keown, Gannon, & Ward, 2010), Implicit Relational Assessment Procedures (Dawson, Barnes-Holmes, Gresswell, Hart, & Gore, 2009) and lexical decision tasks (Blake & Gannon, 2010;Keown, Gannon, & Ward, 2008) . The majority of these have focused on the simpler-relatively speaking-task of measuring sexual interest.…”

Measuring sexual interest using a pictorial modified Stroop task, a pictorial Implicit Association Test and a Choice Reaction Time task

“…As with the P-MST, a systematic slowing down of reaction times to a given category of stimulus is interpreted as indicating an attentional bias towards this stimulus category. This task has been used several times to attempt to measure sexual interest generally (Santtila, et al, 2009;Wright & Adams, 1994, 1999 and also to attempt to measure sexual interest in offenders (Giotakos, 2005;Gress, 2011;Mokros, et al, 2010). Adams (1994, 1999) demonstrated that the CRT paradigm could be used to correctly classify gay and straight men and women.…”