Methodological Features of Pedophilic Disorder Assessment Using an Eyetracker

The article presents the results of an original pilot study aimed at revealing peculiarities of oculomotor activity in persons with pedophilic disorder under conditions of specific erotic visual stimulation. 36 men were examined at the Laboratory of Forensic Sexology of the V.P. Serbsky National Medical Research Centre for Psychiatry and Narcology of the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation. The study group consisted of the subjects diagnosed with pedophilia (28%), the control group included those tested without clinical signs of sexual preference disorder (72%). Oculomotor behavior was studied when viewing photographs of women and children in everyday settings. The results of the study revealed that subjects with pedophile disorder had peculiarities of oculomotor activity that differed from those in the normative sample. In particular, persons with pedophilia commit a greater number of fixations on the image of a child, and the total duration of fixations when viewing the image of a child is longer than in the control group. The findings suggest that fixation activity is significant in the evaluation of sexual preferences in the examined subjects.

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