中華心理衛生協會

 Purpose: Negative emotions are an essential antecedent of sexual offending, especially the negative emotions associated with the emergence of deviant sexual fantasies. Sexual offenders against children are most likely to fantasize about children when feeling depressed. How the sexual preferences of sexual offenders change when they are in a depressed emotional state is an important topic that has been little examined, in part because indirect measurement of sexual preference needs more investigation. This study examines attentional preference for photos of girls (child stimuli) when in a manipulated depressed emotional state, using a sample of non-clinical individuals with high child sexual preference. Based on Posner's theory of attentional networks, which distinguished attentional functions into alerting, orienting, and executive network, we hypothesized that individuals with a high sexual preference for children may have higher alerting and orienting attention, and lower executive attention for child stimuli when in a depressed emotional state as compared to individuals with a low sexual preference for children. Methods: We recruited 120 male participants with no criminal history, ranging in age from 20 to 54 years (M = 27.41, SD = 7.61). We used the child sexual preference scale to divide participants into a low sexual preference group (n = 62) and a high sexual preference group (n = 58). We used a between-subjects design to randomly assign them to a depressed or neutral emotional manipulation task. Before and after the emotional manipulation, the participants completed an emotional attention network test to evaluate their alerting, orienting, and executive network when viewing photos of scenery, women, or girls. Also, we estimated the level of happiness, anger, anxiety, sadness, fear, loneliness, and guilt before and after the emotional manipulation. We analyzed the data with a mixed-design analysis of variance. Results: We identified 3 main findings. First, compared to the low sexual preference group, the high sexual preference group had more difficulty disengaging their attention from photos of girls than photos of women. Second, after the neutral emotional manipulation task, the high sexual preference group showed increased alerting in their attentional network to photos of women than they did before the neutral emotional manipulation. Third, the high sexual preference group's alertness to girls was slightly higher (but not significant) than their alertness to women when they had a higher level of anger. The opposite was true (but also not significant) when the level of anger was lower. Conclusions: This study verified that the attentional preference for girls among participants with a high child sexual preference is reflected in their alerting and orienting networks. Further research is needed to determine whether their level of depression or other negative emotions may be correlated with their attentional preference for adults verses children.