IQ, Handedness, and Pedophilia in Adult Male Patients Stratified by Referral Source

To determine whether the effects of low-level lead exposure persist, we reexamined 132 of 270 young adults who had initially been studied as primary school-children in 1975 through 1978. In the earlier study, neurobehavioral functioning was found to be inversely related to dentin lead levels. As compared with those we restudied, the other 138 subjects had had somewhat higher lead levels on earlier analysis, as well as significantly lower IQ scores and poorer teachers' ratings of classroom behavior. When the 132 subjects were reexamined in 1988, impairment in neurobehavioral function was still found to be related to the lead content of teeth shed at the ages of six and seven. The young people with dentin lead levels greater than 20 ppm had a markedly higher risk of dropping out of high school (adjusted odds ratio, 7.4; 95 percent confidence interval, 1.4 to 40.7) and of having a reading disability (odds ratio, 5.8; 95 percent confidence interval, 1.7 to 19.7) as compared with those with dentin lead levels less than 10 ppm. Higher lead levels in childhood were also significantly associated with lower class standing in high school, increased absenteeism, lower vocabulary and grammatical-reasoning scores, poorer hand-eye coordination, longer reaction times, and slower finger tapping. No significant associations were found with the results of 10 other tests of neurobehavioral functioning. Lead levels were inversely related to self-reports of minor delinquent activity. We conclude that exposure to lead in childhood is associated with deficits in central nervous system functioning that persist into young adulthood.

This study investigated whether being charged with a child pornography offense is a valid diagnostic indicator of pedophilia, as represented by an index of phallometrically assessed sexual arousal to children. The sample of 685 male patients was referred between 1995 and 2004 for a sexological assessment of their sexual interests and behavior. As a group, child pornography offenders showed greater sexual arousal to children than to adults and differed from groups of sex offenders against children, sex offenders against adults, and general sexology patients. The results suggest child pornography offending is a stronger diagnostic indicator of pedophilia than is sexually offending against child victims. Theoretical and clinical implications are discussed. Copyright 2006 APA, all rights reserved.

Face perception is mediated by a distributed neural system in the human brain. Attention, memory and emotion modulate the neural activation evoked by faces, however the effects of gender and sexual orientation are currently unknown. To test whether subjects would respond more to their sexually-preferred faces, we scanned 40 hetero- and homosexual men and women whilst they assessed facial attractiveness. Behaviorally, regardless of their gender and sexual orientation, all subjects similarly rated the attractiveness of both male and female faces. Consistent with our hypothesis, a three-way interaction between stimulus gender, beauty and the sexual preference of the subject was found in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). In heterosexual women and homosexual men, attractive male faces elicited stronger activation than attractive female faces, whereas in heterosexual men and homosexual women, attractive female faces evoked stronger activation than attractive male faces. These findings suggest that the OFC represents the value of salient sexually-relevant faces, irrespective of their reproductive fitness.