The dual cognitive process analysis of sexual offending and violent assault: trigger and inhibit associative process
Date Issued
2014
Date
2014
Author(s)
Huang, Chien
Abstract
A huge deal of literature regarding theories of sexual offending has pointed out two critical issues: how and why offending occurs, and how to prevent it from happen which target at the understanding toward its etiology and pathogenesis. Researchers and practitioners could identify the important clinical phenomena from the theory knitting and construction to realize the underlying psychological mechanism of sexual offending. Researchers found the model of dual cognitive process analysis of the underlying psychological mechanism of sexual offending, which appear offenders’ trigger and inhibit associative process under sexual arousal. Based on the above perspectives, the present study aims to integrate different theories and research results, In light of the conceptual model, a series of experimental studies investigating sexual offenders’ associative process and reflective process under sexual-related stimulus and after that decision-making of their sexual intent were conducted. Methods: Two pilot studies were conducted to select proper words and photos as materials for the following formal experiments. The first one was a photo arrangement task to identify their arousal level. Then a photo-thoughts/feeling fill-out procedure was done as the second pilot study. In the formal studies, participants were recruited into 3 groups, namely the normal controls, the sexual offenders, and the illicit drug users as the criminal controls. In study 1, a priming procedure inducing the sexual arousal of participants was applied followed by a psychological distance scaling task. Then they were requested to make a decision about sexual intent or not. In study 2, participants were induced into a reflective process which may or may not inhibit their original associative process and sexual intent. Then the following procedure was administered as the same steps of study 1. Results: Three indices of cognitive structure accessibility forming the participants’ psychological distance scaling were measured as their associative process. In study 1, some significant results with intra-schema comparison were reflected by that more sexual schema and non-hostility concepts clustered in the quadrant of ‘like me-positive’ in the offender groups. However, in the criminal control group, the hostility schema and female objects only significantly more located in the quadrant of ‘not-like me-negative’. After comparing the inter-stimulus distance of different schemas, the general criminal groups manifested closer psychological distances of their sexual schema, but the result of significantly closer psychological distances of hostility schema was only presented in the criminal control group. With regard to the inter-schema association comparison, the two offender groups have closer psychological distances of ‘sexual-hostility-female’. After the above tasks, a significant difference of sexual intent decision was also revealed. However, no between-group differences were found from their cognitive distortion questionnaires. In study 2, we tried to activate the reflective process as an inhibitor or exploiter of their cognitive resources, and then the significant difference in participants’ sexual intent was revealed. In conclusion, the dual cognitive process consisting of the associative and reflective process is suggested to play an important role in sexual offending.
Subjects
性暴力攻擊
雙重認知歷程
心理距離
連結處理
反思處理
SDGs
Type
thesis
File(s)![Thumbnail Image]()
Loading...
Name
ntu-103-D98227203-1.pdf
Size
23.54 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum
(MD5):f956e6f0f582cdbcc5e430c1484aa7eb