Unraveling the neuropsychological underpinnings of behavioral regulation problems of child sexual offenders

Subtitle:reinforcement learning impairments and emotion recognition impairments

One important contributing factor to the onset and maintenance of sexual offending behavior against children, is the inability to regulate oneself or one’s behavior (i.e., self-regulation or behavioral regulation problems). Accordingly, improving behavioral regulation is one of the most important goals in the treatment of individuals committing sexual offenses against children (i.e., child sexual offenders; CSOs). Up to now, however, a precise understanding of the behavioral regulation impairments and the mechanisms that underlie these impairments is lacking, which makes it difficult to design targeted treatment strategies to address these impairments. This thesis, therefore, sat out to expand our knowledge on the mechanisms that underpin this contributory factor. In order to do this, we drew on the ideas of Ward and colleagues, who recommended to ground the contributory factors to sexual offending in neuropsychological constructs and processes. Whereas most attention has been given to executive functions when studying the neuropsychological underpinnings of behavioral regulation problems, this thesis studied two other neuropsychological processes that might also play a role in the behavioral regulation problems of CSOs, that is reinforcement learning and facial affect recognition. These processes that are critically involved in the inhibition of unwanted behavior, attracted considerable attention in the offender literature, where reinforcement learning impairments and affect recognition impairments have been described in antisocial, particularly aggressive populations. Reinforcement learning is the process by which individuals learn to associate their actions with the outcomes that follow, and modulate their behavior in the service of these outcomes, which function as reinforcement. In general, individuals will select behaviors that are associated with high-valued outcomes (i.e., rewards) and suppress behaviors that are associated with negative outcomes (i.e., punishments). Affect recognition ability also plays a crucial role in the regulation of one’s behavior as emotions serve as reinforcers on the basis of which individuals modulate their behavior. Whereas displays of positive emotions reinforce the behaviors leading to these emotions, signs of distress, in particular fear and sadness, prompt to inhibit the behaviors that elicit this distress. Although these processes have been largely overlooked in the sexual offender literature up to now, the research in this thesis clearly indicates that the neuropsychological impairments that are involved in the behavioral regulation difficulties of CSOs are not limited to purely cognitive executive dysfunctions, but also include dysfunctions in reinforcement learning and affect recognition. These results allow to identify new treatment possibilities that can be added to traditional approaches of working with CSOs to improve therapeutic outcomes for CSOs.

Publication year:2021

Keywords:Doctoral thesis

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