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

Pedophilic disorder, a subtype of paraphilia, is defined as a recurrent sexual interest in prepubescent children, which is characterized by persistent thoughts, fantasies, urges, sexual arousal or behavior. A deviant sexual preference is one of the major predictors for sexual recidivism of sexual offenders . Currently, the Western European standard for the assessment of sexual interest are self-reports. But it is known that self-reports and questionnaires are susceptible to denial or faking. It has been suggested to combine self-reports,questionnaires, physiological and indirect measures of sexual deviant interest. Indirect measures assess either physiological information about the participant or use cognitive approaches of different kinds to gather information, instead of asking the participant directly about his sexuality.

In recent years a whole range of indirect measures have been developed, which are based on different cognitive approaches. The Implicit Association Test (IAT), for example, is based on the knowledge that (dependent on the individual sexual preference) certain categories are more strongly associated with the concept of sexual arousal than others. Subjective sexual arousal can be defined as an emotional experience, which includes the awareness of autonomic arousal, expectation of reward, and motivated desire. Resting upon this definition, the information processing approach of Spiering and Everaerd assumes that sexually relevant features of a stimulus are preattentively selected and automatically induce focal attention to these sexually relevant aspects. Based on this approach, Fromberger et al. used an eye tracking technology to investigate pedophiles in an initial orientation approach. Read more..............