My research focuses upon risk assessment for individuals who have committed sexual offenses. One line of research deals with adolescents who have committed sexual offenses. With my collaborator, Sue Righthand, we are evaluating the predictive validity of the Juvenile Sex Offender Assessment Protocol – II. The current study is an archival investigation of records of adolescents convicted of sexual offenses between 1995 and 2002. J-SOAP-II ratings are being made based upon psychological evaluations and other records collected at the time of their sentencing. We will be examining arrest records for these youth over the subsequent five to 12 years. The second line of research is laboratory-based. We are developing an alternative measure of sexual interest that utilizes the startle eye blink as a measure of attraction to sexual stimuli. The size of a man’s eye blink when startled is modulated by his emotional state. If startled while looking at an image he finds attractive, his eye blink will be relatively small. In contrast, the blink is large if he is startled while attending to an aversive image. The emotion-modulation of the startle eye blink does not appear to be under conscious control. We are exploring ways that the relationship between startle eye blink and emotional state can be used to assess men’s interest in normative and deviant sexual stimuli.
Articles
Emotional Processing in the Treatment of Simple Phobia: A Comparison of Imaginal and In Vivo Exposure, Behavioural Psychotherapy (1990)
Two groups of moderately snake phobic college students were given either imaginal or in vivo...
Application of Imagery Theory to Sport Psychology: Some Preliminary Findings (with Linda M. Kaczor), Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology (1988)
Bioinformational theory has been proposed by Lang (1979a), who suggests that mental images can be...
Insight Versus Rehearsal in Cognitive-Behavior Therapy: A Crossover Study with Sixteen Phobics (with Geoffrey L. Thorpe, Lorraine A. Cavallaro, and Gordon E. Kulberg), Behavioural Psychotherapy (1987)
Although cognitive restructuring (CR) procedures have not proven very helpful for phobics in recent studies,...
Fear Reduction Processes in Imaginal and In Vivo Flooding: A Comment on James' Review (with Geoffrey L. Thorpe), Behavioural Psychotherapy (1987)
The research comparing imaginal and in vivo exposure in the treatment of clinically significant fear,...