Keywords: Sexual perception Sexual aggression Social perception Non-verbal communication General Recognition Theory

sought to explicate the perceptual and decisional sources of these social perception errors, as well as their link to risk for sexual violence. General Recognition Theory (GRT; [Ashby, F. G., & Townsend, J. T. (1986). Varieties of perceptual independence. Psychological Review, 93, 154–179]) was used to estimate participants ’ ability to discriminate between affective cues and clothing style cues and tomeasure illusory correlations betweenmen’s perception ofwomen’s clothing style and sexual interest. High-riskmenwere less sensitive to the distinction between women’s friendly and sexual interest cues relative to other men. In addition, they were more likely to perceive an illusory correlation between women’s diagnostic sexual interest cues (e.g., facial affect) and non-diagnostic cues (e.g., provocative clothing), which increases the probability that high-risk men will misperceive friendly women as intending to communicate sexual interest. The results provide information about the degree of risk conferred by individual differences in perceptual processing of women’s interest cues, and also illustrate how translational scientists might adapt GRT to examine research questions about individual differences in social perception. © 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Decoding sexual intent is an arguably difficult task, particularly if the perceiver hopes to decode intent early in an interaction