Suchergebnisse

There are at least two different criteria for assessing pedophilia in men: absolute ascertainment (their sexual interest in children is intense) and relative ascertainment (their sexual interest in children is greater than their interest in adults). The American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 3rd edition ( DSM-III) used relative ascertainment in its diagnostic criteria for pedophilia; this was abandoned and replaced by absolute ascertainment in the DSM-III-R and all subsequent editions. The present study was conducted to demonstrate the continuing need for relative ascertainment, particularly in the laboratory assessment of pedophilia. A total of 402 heterosexual men were selected from a database of patients referred to a specialty clinic. These had undergone phallometric testing, a psychophysiological procedure in which their penile blood volume was monitored while they were presented with a standardized set of laboratory stimuli depicting male and female children, pubescents, and adults.The 130 men selected for the Teleiophilic Profile group responded substantially to prepubescent girls but even more to adult women; the 272 men selected for the Pedophilic Profile group responded weakly to prepubescent girls but even less to adult women. In terms of absolute magnitude, every patient in the Pedophilic Profile group had a lesser penile response to prepubescent girls than every patient in the Teleiophilic Profile group. Nevertheless, the Pedophilic Profile group had a significantly greater number of known sexual offenses against prepubescent girls, indicating that they contained a higher proportion of true pedophiles. These results dramatically demonstrate the utility—or perhaps necessity—of relative ascertainment in the laboratory assessment of erotic age—preference.

Adult men's height reflects, not only their genetic endowment, but also the conditions that were present during their development in utero and in childhood. We compared the adult heights of men who committed one or more sexual offenses and who were erotically interested in prepubescent children (pedophilic sexual offenders; n=223), those who were erotically interested in pubescent children (hebephilic sexual offenders; n=615), and those who were erotically interested in adults (teleiophilic sexual offenders; n=187), as well as men who had no known sexual offenses and who were erotically interested in adults (teleiophilic nonoffender controls; n=156). The pedophilic and the hebephilic sexual offenders were significantly shorter than the teleiophilic nonoffender controls. The teleiophilic sexual offenders were intermediate in height between the nonoffenders and the pedophilic and hebephilic sexual offenders and not significantly different from any of the other groups. This suggests that—regardless of whatever psychological sequelae might also have followed from the conditions present during early development—pedophilic and hebephilic sexual offenders were subject to conditions capable of affecting their physiological development.

Phallometric assessments of single-victim sexual offenders against children have suggested that only about 50% of these men are more attracted to children than they are to adults. This has raised the question of what motivates the other 50% of men to approach young girls for sex. Freund et al. showed that gynephilic men (i.e., men preferentially attracted to adult women) evidenced greater arousal to images of prepubescent girls than to images of males of any age or to nonerotic images, arguing that gynephilic men may approach prepubescent girls as a "surrogate" for their preferred erotic targets (i.e., adult women). One might argue that these phallometric results are artifactual, given that they were obtained in a time period during which images of nudity were far less common than they are today (thus any female nudity might have elicited arousal). To address this issue, the authors examined the sexual arousal patterns of 214 contemporary men who, based on self-report, offense history, and phallometric responses, were purely gynephilic. Results showed the "classical control profile": the greatest arousal to adult women, systematically decreasing arousal as the female stimuli became younger, and essentially no arousal to any age categories of males or to neutral (nonerotic) stimuli. Arousal to both pubescent and prepubescent girls was significantly greater than to neutral stimuli ( p < .001 for both). Thus, Freund et al.'s results still appear to be valid, and the explanation for child molesting that they suggest still seems to be feasible.

Phallometric testing is widely considered the best psychophysiological procedure for assessing erotic preferences in men. Researchers have differed, however, on the necessity of setting some minimum criterion of penile response for ascertaining the interpretability of a phallometric test result. Proponents of a minimum criterion have generally based their view on the intuitive notion that "more is better" rather than any formal demonstration of this. The present study was conducted to investigate whether there is any empirical evidence for this intuitive notion, by examining the relation between magnitude of penile response and the agreement in diagnoses obtained in two test sessions using different laboratory stimuli. The results showed that examinees with inconsistent diagnoses responded less on both tests and that examinees with inconsistent diagnoses responded less on the second test after controlling for their response on the first test. Results also indicated that at response levels less than 1 cm3, diagnostic consistency was no better than chance, supporting the establishment of a minimum response level criterion.

This study investigated whether the previously observed association of pedophilia with lower IQs is an artifact of heterogeneity in referral source. The subjects were 832 adult male patients referred to a specialty clinic for evaluation of their sexual behavior. The patients' erotic preferences for prepubescent, pubescent, or adult partners were assessed with phallometric testing. Full scale IQ was estimated using six subtests from the WAIS-R. The results showed that the relations between pedophilia and lower IQ, lesser education, and increased rates of non-right-handedness were the same in homogeneous groups referred by lawyers or parole and probation officers as they were in a heterogeneous group referred by a miscellany of other sources. Those results, along with secondary analyses in the study, supported the conclusion that the relation between pedophilia and cognitive function is genuine and not artifactual. The findings were interpreted as evidence for the hypothesis that neurodevelopmental perturbations increase the risk of pedophilia in males.