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Emotional Congruence with Children: Are Implicit and Explicit Child-Like Self-Concept and Attitude Toward Children Associated with Sexual Offending Against Children?

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Abstract

Some men convicted of sexual offences against children express an exaggerated affiliation with childhood, ascribe child-like characteristics to themselves, experience strong non-sexual liking of children, and hold positive views of children and childhood. These features are generally called emotional congruence with children. The present study examined child-like self-concept, which is an association of self with children and child-like characteristics, attitude toward children, and general emotional congruence with children as correlates of sexual offending against children and pedophilia. Male participants (18 sexual offenders against unrelated children; 7 incest offenders; 22 non-sexual offenders; 54 students) completed newly developed implicit and explicit measures of child-like self-concept and attitude toward children, as well as more established self-report measures of emotional congruence with children. Assessments of pedophilic interest and sexual recidivism risk were obtained from official file information. Sexual offenders against unrelated children reported higher levels of implicit child-like self-concept and self-reported emotional congruence with children when compared to the other three groups. Implicit child-like self-concept showed a small correlation with emotional congruence measures, whereas implicit attitude toward children was moderately correlated with the emotional congruence measures. Implicit child-like self-concept, implicit attitude toward children, and the emotional congruence measures were associated with greater pedophilic interest and sexual recidivism risk. The present findings provide a nuanced understanding of the emotional congruence with children construct and have implications for theory, research, and treatment of sexual offenders against children.

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Notes

  1. This low level of internal consistency may be attributable to the small number of items in this scale (i.e., 2 items), as including few items can underestimate reliability (Graham, 2006). Interestingly, scales with fewer items can actually have the same or higher levels of inter-item correlations when compared to scales with more items, but the alpha coefficients are roughly equivalent for both scales (Schmitt 1996). This scale did not have a low reliability in the Waldon et al. study, and this suggests that even though there are reasonable explanations for the present study finding a low alpha coefficient, results from the Preference for Relationships with Children scale should be interpreted cautiously.

  2. The low alpha coefficients and the number of items in each scale prompted us to examine the inter-item correlation matrices for these two CIS-R scales. The minority of the inter-item correlations were moderate to large correlations, while the majority were either close to 0 or were in the negative direction. These correlations suggest these items are unrelated to each other and do not assess the same construct. We ran the main analyses using these two scales, but the results were in the unexpected direction or the correlations were almost nil. Given the low alphas, the low and negative inter-item correlations, and the discrepant results, we have not reported the results for these two CIS-R scales here. The full results are available from the first author upon request.

  3. Age and sexual orientation were not associated with the dependent measures of emotional congruence with children (all rs < |.19|). These demographics were not included as covariates in the main analyses.

  4. The Positive Affect from Children subscale of the EC–CSQ was collinear with the total score (r > .90). Results from this factor closely mirrored the results of the total score; due to this and a finding of collinearity, we do not present results for this subscale here.

  5. The Attachment to Children subscale of the CIS-R was collinear with the total score (r > .90). Due to this finding of collinearity and the pattern of results for this subscale closely mirroring the total scale results, we do not present results from this subscale here.

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Acknowledgements

The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the Correctional Service of Canada or the Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services of Ontario. We are grateful to Cathrine Pettersen for assisting with data collection, and to the many people who facilitated access to the institutions and participants: Chuck Bennet, Maureen Butler, Terry Chaplin, Anita Cumbleton, Brian Grant, Grant Harris, Greg Maillett, Erin McCormick, and Marnie Rice.

Funding

This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Standard Research Grant 410-2008-947 and an Institutional Grant).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK, S7N 5A5, Canada

    Ian V. McPhail

  2. Department of Psychology, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada

    Kevin L. Nunes

  3. Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services, Kingston, ON, Canada

    Chantal A. Hermann

  4. Correctional Service Canada, Kingston, ON, Canada

    Rikki Sewell & Yolanda M. Fernandez

  5. Independent Researcher, Campbellford, ON, Canada

    Edward J. Peacock

  6. Providence Care Mental Health Services, Kingston, ON, Canada

    Jan Looman

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  1. Ian V. McPhail
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Correspondence to Ian V. McPhail.

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Ethics approval for this research was received from Carleton University’s Research Ethics Board. All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. For this type of study formal consent is not required.

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McPhail, I.V., Nunes, K.L., Hermann, C.A. et al. Emotional Congruence with Children: Are Implicit and Explicit Child-Like Self-Concept and Attitude Toward Children Associated with Sexual Offending Against Children?. Arch Sex Behav 47, 2241–2254 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-018-1288-2

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