The Department of Psychology
invites Academic Staff and Students to a lecture on
The Measurement of Sexual Interest in Sexual Offenders
by Caoilte Ó Ciardha, PhD
on Wednesday 26 October at 12:00hrs in OH 101 (Psychology Lab)
It’s easy to think of sexual interest as a unitary construct. After all we talk about people’s sexual orientation in easily defined labels. We also talk about individuals who sexually offend in homogenising labels like 'paedophile' that reduce the individual to the target of their sexual interest. We tend to ignore the fact that for someone to experience a genital response following exposure to a given stimuli, a lot of processes must occur in between. Taking advantage of these different processes allow us to develop multiple ways of measuring people’s sexual interest, or at least measuring parts of what makes up people’s sexual interests. These approaches can include attentional, associative, and physiological measures. In this presentation, research findings from Dr Ó Ciardha's own research will be drawn upon to talk about some of these approaches and their potential as objective measures of sexual interest in children. The importance of developing measures of forensically relevant sexual interest for the assessment of individuals who have sexually offended will be underscored.
Caoilte Ó Ciardha, Ph.D. is a Lecturer in Forensic Psychology at the Centre of Research and Education in Forensic Psychology (CORE-FP), part of the School of Psychology at the University of Kent. His primary research interests are in sexual offending and in adult firesetting. He is particularly interested in theory and assessment of the role of cognition in offending behaviour. Caoilte has published 30 journal articles and book sections since 2011.