Preliminary evidence for an automatic link between sex and power among men who molest children

Understanding critical motivational processes of sexual offenders may ultimately provide important clues to more effective treatments. Implicit, automatic cognitive processes have received minimal attention; however, a lexical decision experiment revealed automatic links between the concepts of power and sex among participants who self-reported attraction to sexual aggression. The current study replicates this experiment with a group of male child molesters and forensic and analogue controls. Subliminally presented sex words elicited a facilitation effect for power words among child molesters only; that is, sex to power associations were evident, as well as a trend for the reverse. These results provide preliminary evidence for an automatic sex-power association in child molesters and may point to a crucial pathological link in the cognitive schemata of sex offenders. As well, the current study suggests that paradigms from cognitive psychology may contribute to multimodal (risk) assessment of sexual offenders.