Using eye-related measures to assess sexual interests

Sexual arousal to offence related images remains one of the best single predictors of future sexual offending, particularly for child offenders. However, a more complex stimulus material is required to understand sexual offences against adults: the offender-victim relationship, extent of control and resistance, depictions of pain, and other related interpersonal factors are important. As a result, several implicit cognitive measures have been developed to study sexual interests (e.g., IAT, IRAP, etc.) however they are not without limitations. Recently the application of eye-tracking and gaze direction methodology to the assessment of sexual preference/interest has become increasingly popular. To date, the reliance on static images poses a threat to ecological validity. To address this, we have developed a new data-driven methodology that directly tracks eye movements to reveal group differences when viewing moving scenes. In this session we demonstrate how eye-tracking can be used to compare between group differences (e.g., offenders/non-offenders or positive/negative offence related attitudes) in the viewing of offence related moving scenes (e.g., consent, rape or violence). Our method allows for identification of the of video clip sections that best distinguish groups of interest. For example, on the positive-negative attitude spectrum by revealing the section of each video clip which best distinguishes between those with more negative verse more positive offence related attitudes. This ability to empirically identify such critical behavioural sections which are viewed differently by potential offenders and non-offenders has significant implications for future forensic clinical assessments and research methodologies. Possibly future uses of the methodology are discussed