This project integrates conflicting lines of inquiry concerning the sexual and non-sexual motives of child sexual offenders by examining interactions between both types of motives. The project represents an explicit attempt to blend theory and practice by adopting a social cognitive perspective on the assessment of cognitive representations of sexual experiences for both child sexual offenders and control subjects matched on probationary and socioeconomic status. Psychometric mental modeling techniques, including multi-dimensional scaling and Pathfinder analyses, will be employed to create spatial models of beliefs about the interrelationships between emotions, motivations, and sexual desires. These models will be assessed both qualitatively and quantitatively to identify differences in the salience of goals for offenders versus controls (a) to more accurately specify conditions that are likely to activate deviant sexual arousal patterns and (b) to gain insight into cognitive belief structures that may underlie cognitive distortions. Results will also enhance clinicians' ability to focus interventions on the cognitive and motivational factors most closely associated with deviant sexual desires. Finally, the derived pictorial representations have potential to serve as educational tools by making it possible to "see" how various sexual and motivational beliefs are related to one another for child sexual offenders.
NIH ExPorter
NIH ExPorter