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 pedophilic interest. However, further research is needed. A lot of indirect measures are still at the developmental stage regarding clinical application. They do not reach appropriate psychometric criteria or are not yet sufficiently tested for susceptibility to manipulation or deception. Furthermore, for some paradigms, the exact mechanisms underlying the attentional 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 be lower than in easier tasks and in passive designs. Twenty-two pedophiles, seven forensic control subjects and 50 healthy men performed cognitive tasks. Simultaneously, sexually relevant and sexually non-relevant distractors were presented. Meanwhile, their cognitive performance and eye movements were assessed.