ABSTRACT

Identifying pedophilic sexual interest among persons who have sexually offended against children (PSOCs) is important for risk assessment because not all PSOCs are pedophilic. Existing physiological and self-report methods have several limitations. In the present study, sexual interest was assessed indirectly by means of a computer task: the Choice Reaction Time (CRT) task in 49 extrafamilial PSOCs and 25 persons without a history of sexual offences against children (control group). The results showed that PSOCs, the participants with a DSM-IV diagnosis of pedophilia or with a high score on pedophilic interest (measured by the SSPI-2) performed equally fast in the different age category stimuli. In other words, no effect of sexual orientation towards children was found. The control group however, showed longer reaction times for the adult and adolescent stimuli compared to the child stimuli, indicative that they did not have a sexual orientation towards children. The present study found only partial evidence for the validity of the CRT paradigm, as it was effective in discriminating age orientation in the control group but not in the group of PSOCs.

摘要

识别对儿童进行性侵犯的人 (PSOC) 的恋童癖性兴趣对于风险评估很重要，因为并非所有 PSOC 都是恋童癖。现有的生理和自我报告方法有几个局限性。在本研究中，性兴趣通过计算机任务间接评估：选择反应时间 (CRT) 任务在 49 个家庭外 PSOC 和 25 个没有针对儿童的性犯罪史的人（对照组）。结果表明，PSOCs，即 DSM-IV 诊断为恋童癖或恋童癖兴趣高分（由 SSPI-2 衡量）的参与者在不同年龄类别的刺激中表现同样快。换言之，没有发现性取向对儿童的影响。然而，对照组，与儿童刺激相比，成人和青少年刺激的反应时间更长，表明他们对儿童没有性取向。本研究仅发现 CRT 范式有效性的部分证据，因为它在区分对照组中的年龄取向方面有效，但在 PSOC 组中无效。