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

Indirect measures of deviant sexual interest have yielded interesting and promising in the field of pedophilicinterest. However, further research is needed. A lot of indirect measures are still at the developmental stageregarding clinical application. They do not reach appropriate psychometric criteria or are not yet sufficiently tested forsusceptibility to manipulation or deception. Furthermore, for some paradigms, the exact mechanisms underlying theattentional processes are still under discussion. This study aimed to measure sexual interest under cognitive load.With this challenging active task subject’s possibility to manipulate their response to the sexual stimuli should belower than in easier tasks and in passive designs. Twenty-two pedophiles, seven forensic control subjects and 50healthy men performed cognitive tasks. Simultaneously, sexually relevant and sexually non-relevant distractors werepresented. Meanwhile, their cognitive performance and eye movements were assessed.As expected healthy subjects showed a certain impairment of cognitive performance when sexually relevantdistractors were presented to them. They took significantly more time to look at sexual adult distractors than atsexual child distractors. In contrast, both forensic groups performed much poorer than the healthy control groupwithout specificity for certain sexual distractors. While forensic control subjects tended to view adult stimuli longerthan those of children, no differences were found for pedophiles. The age preference index for the fixation timedifferentiated moderately between pedophiles and non-pedophiles.Our design worked well with healthy subjects. Further studies should examine if an individual adaptation of thetask difficulty could help to find the expected cognitive performance impairments of pedophiles and forensic subjectswhen they are presented with certain distractor categories.