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Assessment of pedophilia using hemodynamic brain response to sexual stimuli.
- Source :
-
Archives of general psychiatry [Arch Gen Psychiatry] 2012 Feb; Vol. 69 (2), pp. 187-94. Date of Electronic Publication: 2011 Oct 03. - Publication Year :
- 2012
-
Abstract
- Context: Accurately assessing sexual preference is important in the treatment of child sex offenders. Phallometry is the standard method to identify sexual preference; however, this measure has been criticized for its intrusiveness and limited reliability.<br />Objective: To evaluate whether spatial response pattern to sexual stimuli as revealed by a change in the blood oxygen level-dependent signal facilitates the identification of pedophiles.<br />Design: During functional magnetic resonance imaging, pedophilic and nonpedophilic participants were briefly exposed to same- and opposite-sex images of nude children and adults. We calculated differences in blood oxygen level-dependent signals to child and adult sexual stimuli for each participant. The corresponding contrast images were entered into a group analysis to calculate whole-brain difference maps between groups. We calculated an expression value that corresponded to the group result for each participant. These expression values were submitted to 2 different classification algorithms: Fisher linear discriminant analysis and κ -nearest neighbor analysis. This classification procedure was cross-validated using the leave-one-out method.<br />Setting: Section of Sexual Medicine, Medical School, Christian Albrechts University of Kiel, Kiel, Germany.<br />Participants: We recruited 24 participants with pedophilia who were sexually attracted to either prepubescent girls (n = 11) or prepubescent boys (n = 13) and 32 healthy male controls who were sexually attracted to either adult women (n = 18) or adult men (n = 14).<br />Main Outcome Measures: Sensitivity and specificity scores of the 2 classification algorithms.<br />Results: The highest classification accuracy was achieved by Fisher linear discriminant analysis, which showed a mean accuracy of 95% (100% specificity, 88% sensitivity).<br />Conclusions: Functional brain response patterns to sexual stimuli contain sufficient information to identify pedophiles with high accuracy. The automatic classification of these patterns is a promising objective tool to clinically diagnose pedophilia.
- Subjects :
- Adolescent
Adult
Brain blood supply
Case-Control Studies
Child
Female
Heterosexuality physiology
Heterosexuality psychology
Homosexuality, Male psychology
Humans
Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Male
Middle Aged
Pedophilia physiopathology
Pedophilia psychology
Sexual Behavior physiology
Young Adult
Brain physiopathology
Pedophilia diagnosis
Subjects
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 1538-3636
- Volume :
- 69
- Issue :
- 2
- Database :
- MEDLINE
- Journal :
- Archives of general psychiatry
- Publication Type :
- Academic Journal
- Accession number :
- 21969422
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1001/archgenpsychiatry.2011.130