Chapter 2 - Assesment

Here below: (1) Summary, (2) Some quotes

CHAPTER 2 SUMMARY

The major assessment approaches, and their advantages and disadvantages, are
summarized in Table 2.2.

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Although pedophilia can most easily be assessed through self-report, people have
obvious reasons to deny or minimize sexual interest in children, especially because
of legal or other consequences of self-identifying as having pedophilia (…).

Because of this self-report bias, admission of sexual thoughts, fantasies, urges, arousal, or behavior involving prepubescent children is informative, whereas denial of such is
less so. Other assessment methods have been developed because of the vulnerability
of self-report. Polygraph interviewing can increase disclosures, likely because of the
bogus pipeline effect, but the potential for false disclosures as a result is unknown.
The two best objective methods that have been developed for the assessment of male
sexual interests involve the unobtrusive recording of viewing time or reaction time
during tasks involving depictions of children and adults, and the recording of penile
responses in response to sexual stimuli depicting children or adults. Both methods
can distinguish sex offenders against children from other men and both show
evidence of criterion-related validity (e.g., associations with sexual offense history).

Much more evidence has been found regarding phallometry’s predictive validity, however, and multiple studies regarding its sensitivity when clinical cutoff scores are set to provide high specificities of 95% or higher. I therefore continue to recommend the clinical use of phallometry when it is available and the individual consents to participate in the procedure. Care should be taken to vet the procedures used, however, because labs are not standardized, and sortie variations may weaken reliability or validity.

Research attention has also focused on the development of other assessment
methods drawing from cognitive science, including attentional blink paradigms (…).
Some researchers are interested in measures based on behavioral history. The SSPI
and now SSPI-Z have been developed to encompass information about sexual
offending history, drawing heavily on the research literature regarding victim
characteristics.

Some Quotes from Chapter 2

Page 33
Consistent with ,y conceptualization of pedophilia as a sexual orientation for age,
similar in respects to sexual orientation for gender, pedophilia is expressed not only
in sexual interests or behavior, but also in romantic and social choices (Seto 2012 *…)

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Page 43
… Not all sex offenders against children are pedophilic; (…). The strongest test of
these new paradigmas would be to compare (a) pedophilic and non-pedophilic
offenders against children with (b) pedophilic and non-pedophilic men.

Page 47
… Not all offenders with child victims are expected to have pedophilia (or
hebephilia); only some offenders have a child-focused chronophilias, with others
committing offenses for non-pedophilic motivations, such as high sex drive or
antisocial opportunism.