Branch 1. Measuring Psychological Constructs Relevant to Harmful Behaviour
This branch focuses on understanding psychological constructs that may be relevant to harmful sexual behaviour, including pedophilia, emotional identification with children, sadism, and related traits. Projects in this area examine how these constructs are defined, structured, and expressed across individuals, with the goal of improving conceptual clarity and supporting more accurate assessment, treatment, and research.
Current Projects in Branch 1
Examining True and Pseudo-Necrophilia
Project Lead: Taylor Mauti
This project examines necrophilic fantasies, with a focus on distinguishing between true necrophilia and pseudo-necrophilia. Specifically, it explores whether these fantasies are related to sexual arousal from death itself or from passivity and unresponsiveness. The project also examines psychological traits that may be associated with necrophilic interests, including social anxiety, sexual anxiety, and sadism. Using a focus group design, participants will respond to prompts by placing themselves along visual axes representing different dimensions of sexual preference. Their placements, verbal explanations, and group discussion will be analyzed to better understand how these fantasies are experienced and described.
Emotional Identification with Children
Project Lead: Calvin Cressman
Collaborators: Andrew Brankley, Cory Gerritsen
The purpose of this study is to develop a plausible series of efficient indicators of emotional identification with children for screening purposes and to increase the ability of the SSPI-2 in identifying pedophilia. An item pool was constructed based upon existing measures of emotional identification that could reasonably be scored using file information. [Click for more]
The efficient and reliable identification of a problem increases the likelihood that it will receive clinical attention. Measures, such as the Revised Screening Scale for Pedophilic Interest (SSPI-2; Seto et al., 2017), provide a rapid screen for physical attraction to children because they only require readily available file information and can be quickly scored. The instruments commonly used to measure emotional identification with children usually require interview or self-report data to score.
File information from the SSPI-2 development sample of 1,900 adult males convicted of a sexually motivated offence against a child was recoded. Data will be fit to a three-level measurement model and redundant variables will be removed or combined utilizing Spearman’s Rho correlations, theory, and consensus. The remaining candidate variables will be dichotomized and used with the original SSPI-2 items to predict existing results from volumetric penile plethysmograph through logistic regression.
Models will be compared based on AIC and BIC values. Success of a model including emotional identification would provide further evidence for the inclusion of the construct as part of pedophilia and guide future revisions of the SSPI-2.
