Measuring sexual interest in persons who have sexually offended against children: investigating the Choice Reaction Time task using the Virtual People Set

Identifying pedophilic sexual interest among persons who have sexually offended against children (PSOCs) is important for risk assessment because not all PSOCs are pedophilic. Existing physiological and self-report methods have several limitations. In the present study, sexual interest was assessed indirectly by means of a computer task: the Choice Reaction Time (CRT) task in 49 extrafamilial PSOCs and 25 persons without a history of sexual offences against children (control group). The results showed that PSOCs, the participants with a DSM-IV diagnosis of pedophilia or with a high score on pedophilic interest (measured by the SSPI-2) performed equally fast in the different age category stimuli. In other words, no effect of sexual orientation towards children was found. The control group however, showed longer reaction times for the adult and adolescent stimuli compared to the child stimuli, indicative that they did not have a sexual orientation towards children. The present study found only partial evidence for the validity of the CRT paradigm, as it was effective in discriminating age orientation in the control group but not in the group of PSOCs.