The Rapid Serial Visual Presentation Test of Sexual Interest in Child Molesters

Flak, Vanja; Beech, Anthony R.; Humphreys, Glyn W.

doi:10.1002/9780470747551.ch7

Cited by 7 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…Recent methods try to assess pedophilic sexual interest applying cognitive approaches [ 27 ], e.g. the implicit association test (IAT) [ 28 ], the viewing time (VT) [ 29 , 30 ], the choice-reaction-time task (CRT); [ 31 ], the rapid serial visual presentation test (RSVP); [ 32 ] or an adaption of the emotional stroop task for sexual offenders [ 33 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Changed processing of visual sexual stimuli under GnRH-therapy – a single case study in pedophilia using eye tracking and fMRI

et al. 2014

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BackgroundAntiandrogen therapy (ADT) has been used for 30 years to treat pedophilic patients. The aim of the treatment is a reduction in sexual drive and, in consequence, a reduced risk of recidivism. Yet the therapeutic success of antiandrogens is uncertain especially regarding recidivism. Meta-analyses and reviews report only moderate and often mutually inconsistent effects.Case presentationBased on the case of a 47 year old exclusively pedophilic forensic inpatient, we examined the effectiveness of a new eye tracking method and a new functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)-design in regard to the evaluation of ADT in pedophiles. We analyzed the potential of these methods in exploring the impact of ADT on automatic and controlled attentional processes in pedophiles. Eye tracking and fMRI measures were conducted before the initial ADT as well as four months after the onset of ADT. The patient simultaneously viewed an image of a child and an image of an adult while eye movements were measured. During the fMRI-measure the same stimuli were presented subliminally.Eye movements demonstrated that controlled attentional processes change under ADT, whereas automatic processes remained mostly unchanged. We assume that these results reflect either the increased ability of the patient to control his eye movements while viewing prepubertal stimuli or his better ability to manipulate his answer in a socially desirable manner. Unchanged automatic attentional processes could reflect the stable pedophilic preference of the patient. Using fMRI, the subliminal presentation of sexually relevant stimuli led to changed activation patterns under the influence of ADT in occipital and parietal brain regions, the hippocampus, and also in the orbitofrontal cortex. We suggest that even at an unconscious level ADT can lead to changed processing of sexually relevant stimuli, reflecting changes of cognitive and perceptive automatic processes.ConclusionWe are convinced that our experimental designs using eye tracking and fMRI could prospectively add additional and valuable information in the evaluation of ADT in paraphilic patients and sex offenders. But with respect to the limited significance of this single case study, these first results are preliminary and further studies have to be conducted with healthy subjects and patients.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Changed processing of visual sexual stimuli under GnRH-therapy – a single case study in pedophilia using eye tracking and fMRI

et al. 2014

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“…, 1996; Letourneau, 2002) and choice reaction time (CRT; Giotakis, 2005; Wright & Adams, 1994, 1999) to assess sexual interest. Additional methodologies include the Emotional Stroop (Price, 2006; Smith, 2009; Smith & Waterman, 2004), eye startle probe reflex (Giargiari, Mahaffey, Craighead, & Hutchison, 2005; Hecker, King, & Scoular, 2006, 2009), and rapid serial visual presentation (Beech, Kalmus, Tipper, Baudouin, Flak, & Humphreys, 2008; Flak, Beech, & Humphreys, 2009) (for more information on the nature, application, and proposed mechanisms that underlie these measures, see Gress & Laws, 2009a, 2009b).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…, and rapid serial visual presentation (Beech, Kalmus, Tipper, Baudouin, Flak, & Humphreys, 2008;Flak, Beech, & Humphreys, 2009) (for more information on the nature, application, and proposed mechanisms that underlie these measures, see Gress & Laws, 2009a, 2009b.…”

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

Gress

Anderson

Laws³

2011

Legal Criminol Psychol

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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.

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“…When participants were required to accurately report both targets, there was a significant decrease of accuracy of reporting for the offender group in sequences where the T2 image followed an image of a child rather than an animal. Grace (), using the RSVP procedure with either clothed or nude male and female T1 in a sample of straight men and women, found that nude images induced a larger AB compared to clothed images and that images of nude females (vs. males) elicited a larger AB in the men (in contrast, images of nude males (vs. females) did not elicit a larger AB in female participants) (Flak, Beech, Humphreys & Glyn, , p. 153). Hudson () failed to find differences between the effects of images of clothed males and females as T1 on men and women (Flak et al ., , p. 153).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Grace (), using the RSVP procedure with either clothed or nude male and female T1 in a sample of straight men and women, found that nude images induced a larger AB compared to clothed images and that images of nude females (vs. males) elicited a larger AB in the men (in contrast, images of nude males (vs. females) did not elicit a larger AB in female participants) (Flak, Beech, Humphreys & Glyn, , p. 153). Hudson () failed to find differences between the effects of images of clothed males and females as T1 on men and women (Flak et al ., , p. 153). Beech, Kalmus, Tipper, Baudouin & Flak (2008) used images of children and animals as T1 and investigated the differences between the effects of these two stimulus types on AB in a sample of 35 child molesters (16 intrafamilial, 19 extrafamilial) and 17 offenders without a known history of sexual offending.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Zappalà¹,

Antfolk

Bäckström

et al. 2013

Scandinavian J Psychology

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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.

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The Rapid Serial Visual Presentation Test of Sexual Interest in Child Molesters

Cited by 7 publications

References 62 publications

Changed processing of visual sexual stimuli under GnRH-therapy – a single case study in pedophilia using eye tracking and fMRI

Changed processing of visual sexual stimuli under GnRH-therapy – a single case study in pedophilia using eye tracking and fMRI

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

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

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