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Inhibiting Sexual Arousal to Children: Correlates and Its Influence on the Validity of Penile Plethysmography

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Abstract

The current study examined the extent to which 1136 men were able to inhibit their sexual arousal on a phallometric assessment, when instructed to do so. Although the observed changes between the two conditions (i.e., Normal and Suppression) were small to moderate in magnitude, the change was not more than what would be expected by measurement error for most participants (e.g., 83% of pedophilic sex offenders against children did not successfully inhibit their sexual arousal in the Suppression condition). There were very few variables that were associated with the ability to suppress. Higher Pedophilia Index scores in the Suppression condition predicted a greater likelihood of sexual recidivism among sex offenders (hazard ratio = 1.17, 95% CI [1.04, 1.32]), but the ability to suppress sexual arousal was not found to predict sexual recidivism. The current study highlights the importance of accounting for measurement error and found that, when doing so, most sex offenders against children are unable to successfully inhibit their sexual arousal to children when instructed to do so, and that the ability to suppress sexual arousal is not associated with recidivism.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Lisa Murphy and Aharon Zohar for their assistance collecting these data. Funding for this project was provided in part by the University of Ottawa Medical Research Fund and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR Banting Fellowship).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Royal’s Institute of Mental Health Research, 1145 Carling Avenue, Ottawa, ON, K1Z 7K4, Canada

    Kelly M. Babchishin, Susan D. Curry, J. Paul Fedoroff & Michael C. Seto

  2. Waypoint Centre for Mental Health, Penetanguishene, ON, Canada

    John Bradford

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  1. Kelly M. Babchishin
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  2. Susan D. Curry
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  3. J. Paul Fedoroff
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Correspondence to Kelly M. Babchishin.

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All authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethical Approval

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 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Appendices

Appendix 1

See Table 6.

Table 6 Discrimination of the Pedophilia Index as indicated by AUC values, index computed as average of stimuli
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Appendix 2

See Tables 7 and 8.

Table 7 Predictive accuracy of the average PPG indices
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Table 8 Recidivism analyses based on z scores computed across the two conditions
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Babchishin, K.M., Curry, S.D., Fedoroff, J.P. et al. Inhibiting Sexual Arousal to Children: Correlates and Its Influence on the Validity of Penile Plethysmography. Arch Sex Behav 46, 671–684 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-017-0952-2

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