Alexander F. Schmidt

Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz | JGU · Institute of Psychology

Previous studies suggest that the process of becoming desistant from crime is accompanied by a shift from criminal to law-abiding identity and by the development of self-efficacy for law-abiding behavior. Utilizing direct (self-report) and indirect (Implicit Association Test; IAT) measures of both variables we predicted that a) a stronger law-abidi...

Assessing another person’s intention to flirt and, relatedly, their sexual interest is based on the interpretation and weighting of global (e.g., clothing style) and specific (e.g., facial expression) cues. Since cue incongruency increases the risk of erroneous judgments and thus can entail undesirable outcomes for both parties involved, detection...

Darknet forums dedicated to child sexual abuse material (CSAM) attract thousands of users interacting with each other through online communications. Given finite resources, law enforcement agencies seek ways to effectively prioritise their investigative efforts by identifying key-players that are central to the forum community. For the identificati...

Possession and distribution of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) is a serious criminal offence facilitated by online technologies. To prevent, investigate, and treat online CSAM offending, comprehensive knowledge of potential risk factors for these crimes is required. Given the large body of relevant research, a systematic overview of the risk fac...

Bias is an inherent phenomenon of information processing that can occur whenever human brains are involved. In forensic psychological assessments, bias threatens the reliability and validity of the conclusions about, for example, the credibility of witness’ statements, the risk of reoffending, child custody, or the competency to stand trial. Given...

Kritischer Überblick und Diskussion der in der ICD-11 eingeführten Neuerungen in der diagnostischen Klassifikation der paraphilen Störungen.

This systematic review aimed to synthesize findings on the characteristics of individuals with cybergrooming offense histories (ICOs), their grooming strategies, and emergent typologies. The Cochrane approach guided the review. Publications were included if they investigated adult ICOs over 18 years of age, the strategies they utilized, their chara...

In their influential paper Wurtele et al. (2014) investigated the degree to which individuals within the general population (N = 435) express sexual interest in children. In the male population of their study (n = 173), about 6% showed a propensity to engage in sexual activity with a child. Based on a German general population sample consisting of...

Objective Cognitive theories emphasize the central role of anger and anger suppression in obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD). According to these theories, anger suppression is seen as a consequence of OCD, whereas cognitive beliefs, such as an inflated sense of responsibility, are seen as antecedent factors. To extend the findings from cross‐secti...

People with pedophilia (PWP) can deal with their sexual desires by relieving sexual arousal without sexually exploiting children. Study 1 investigated whether public reactions toward nonoffending pedophilic men are affected by their strategies to relieve sexual arousal (non-sexual pictures vs. child sex dolls) or to reduce their sex drive via testo...

Applied researchers typically use mean/sum scores as simple scoring method for the 10-item Perceived Stress Scale (PSS-10). However, inferences from such scores can be biased when measures are not essentially unidimensional. A bifactor modeling approach is especially useful to evaluate whether and to what degree ignoring (potential) multidimensiona...

Bias is an inherent phenomenon of human information processing that can occur whenever the human brain is involved. In forensic psychological assessments, bias threatens the reliability and validity of the conclusions about, for example, the credibility of witness’ statements, the risk of reoffending, or child custody. Given the far-reaching conseq...

Background: The darknet hosts an increasing number of hidden services dedicated to the distribution of child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Given that by contributing CSAM to the forum members subject themselves to criminal prosecution, questions regarding the motivation for members contributing to darknet CSAM forums arise. Objective: Building on i...

Biases (Urteilsverzerrungen) sind ein inhärentes Phänomen der menschlichen Informationsverarbeitung und treten folglich auch im Rahmen forensisch-psychologischer Begutachtungen bei Sachverständigen auf. Angesichts der weitreichenden Konsequenzen, die forensisch-psychologische Begutachtungen für Individuen und die Gesellschaft haben, sollten Beurtei...

This study combined research on human mate preferences and attraction to physical and psychological features of children. Specifically, we used the Ideals Standards Model (ISM; Fletcher & Simpson, 2000; Fletcher et al., 1999) as a conceptual framework to investigate the sexual relevance of adult and child sex cues within the general population. A s...

Background: Intrafamilial child sexual abuse (ICSA) is a puzzling phenomenon that is not well understood by researches. Nevertheless, psychologists are demanded to assess the risk for child maltreatment by family courts regarding male caregivers with a history of sex offenses and/or paraphilic interests. Objective: The aim of this study was to ass...

Background: Intrafamilial child sexual abuse (ICSA) is a puzzling phenomenon that is not fully understood by researches. Nevertheless, psychologists are demanded to assess the risk for child maltreatment by family courts regarding male caregivers with a history of sex offenses and/or paraphilic interests. Objective: The aim of this study was to ass...

Based on the theory of cognitive dissonance (Festinger 1957) and the understanding of cognitive distortions as defense mechanisms (Drapeau et al. 2008), we argued that individuals convicted of sexual offenses diagnosed with exclusive pedophilia (epICSOC) report more child offense related cognitive distortions compared to individuals convicted of se...

Die empirische Bewährung von Behandlungsprogrammen von Straftätern (insbesondere Sexualstraftätern) wird seit langem kritisch diskutiert. In diesem Kapitel geben wir einen kurzen Überblick über diese Kontroverse. Wir legen dar, dass nur experimentelle Evaluationsstudien mit zufälliger Zuordnung zu einer Behandlungsgruppe und einer Kontrollgruppe (R...

Preparing potential victims for later sexual abuse has ever since been an integral part of child sexual victimization. Sexual grooming is thus an old epiphenomenon of child sexual abuse that has already been described for hands-on offenders in the pre-Internet era. With the advent of the Internet, sexual online grooming (SOG) of children has sparke...

The latent structure of individual difference constructs is a core concern in psychological science. Understanding latent structure has wide-ranging implications for measurement practices, statistical modelling choices, clinical/applied practice, and research examining etiology and causation. Most constructs in psychological science tend towards di...

Die empirische Bewährung von Behandlungsprogrammen von Straftätern (insbesondere Sexualstraftätern) wird seit langem kritisch diskutiert. In diesem Kapitel geben wir einen kurzen Überblick über diese Kontroverse. Wir legen dar, dass nur experimentelle Evaluationsstudien mit zufälliger Zuordnung zu einer Behandlungsgruppe und einer Kontrollgruppe (R...

Zusammenfassung Der Konsum von Missbrauchsabbildungen hat sich im Hellfeld in den letzten Jahren immer wieder verdoppelt. Dieses erhöhte Fallaufkommen stellt Polizei, Bewährungshilfe und forensische Therapeuten vor eine Vielzahl neuer Herausforderungen. In diesem Beitrag sollen daher aktuelle theoretische Modelle und empirische Erkenntnisse dargest...

Minor-attracted persons (MAPs; i.e., people who are sexually interested in children and adolescents below the age threshold of legal consent for sexual activity) exhibit high psychological distress but report difficulties finding therapeutic help and are reluctant to start treatment due to fears of therapist stigmatization. This research sought to...

The COVID-19 pandemic has massively changed people’s working lives all over the world. While various studies investigated the effects from pandemic-induced unemployment and telecommuting, there is a lack of research regarding the impact of workplace COVID-19 countermeasures on well-being and mental health for employees who are still working on site...

Research on the link between childhood sexual abuse experiences (CSAE) and pedohebephilia is limited by its focus on events that the respondents rate as abusive. We asked 199 German-speaking (Study 1) and 632 English-speaking (Study 2) men with and without self-reported pedohebephilia to complete the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ) and scales...

Forced answering (FA) is a frequent answer format in online surveys that forces respondents to answer each question in order to proceed through the questionnaire. The underlying rationale is to decrease the amount of missing data. Despite its popularity, empirical research on the impact of FA on respondents’ answering behavior is scarce and has gen...

The neurodevelopmental theory of pedohebephilia states that sexual interests in children arise from early neurodevelopmental perturbations, as, for example, evidenced by increased non-right-handedness, more childhood head injuries, and reduced intelligence and height. As corroborating evidence largely rests on samples of convicted men, we conducted...

Minor-attracted persons (MAPs; i.e., people who are sexually interested in children and adolescents below the age threshold of legal consent for sexual activity) exhibit high psychological distress but report difficulties finding therapeutic help and are reluctant to start treatment due to fears of therapist stigmatization. This research sought to...

Paraphilic interests are a cornerstone of forensic assessment. Self-reports of sexual inclinations are fraught with limitations when working with individuals who face extensive personal ramifications from the justice system. A brief overview of indirect measures of pedohebephilic interest as diagnostic adjunct is given focusing on Viewing Time meas...

Im Kapitel werden die Grundlagen zweier übergreifender deliktpräventiver Straftäterbehandlungsmodelle dargestellt. Anhand eines Fallbeispiels wird das Behandlungsvorgehen aus der Perspektive des Risk-Need-Responsivity und des Good Lives Modells überblicksartig beschrieben und kurz auf die Evidenzbasierung beider Ansätze sowie deren Vereinbarkeit ei...

The neurodevelopmental theory of pedohebephilia states that sexual interests in children arise from early neurodevelopmental perturbations, as, for example, evidenced by increased non-right-handedness, more childhood head injuries, and reduced intelligence and height. As corroborating evidence largely rests on samples of convicted men, we conducted...

According to psychodynamic and cognitive models of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), anger and aggression play an important role in the development and maintenance of the disorder. (Sub-) clinical samples with OCD have reported higher anger and anger suppression. Patients with checking-related symptoms of OCD showed a less aggressive self-concep...

Objective Psychodynamic and cognitive theories postulate a prominent role of aggressiveness in patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Explicit assessment of aggressiveness in OCD has yielded diverging results. The present study aimed to investigate aggressiveness in OCD using the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP). Method...

Previous studies suggest that the process of becoming desistant from crime is accompanied by a shift from criminal to law-abiding identity and self-efficacy. We developed direct and indirect measures of both variables and predicted that a stronger law-abiding relative to criminal identity and a stronger/weaker self-efficacy for law-abiding/criminal...

It is almost a cultural truism that erotic images attract our attention, presumably because paying attention to erotic stimuli provided our ancestors with mating benefits. Attention, however, can be narrowly defined as visuospatial attention (keeping such stimuli in view) or more broadly as cognitive attention (such stimuli taking up one’s thoughts...

Although sexual interest is a fundamental part of every sexually reproducing species, it still remains to a large extent an enigma. To this day, a general theory of sexual interest is lacking, specifically, in terms of a causal theory on how sexual interests are developed. This lack of a theoretical framework to explain sexual interest as an everyd...

Except for pedophilia, little is known about public attitudes towards paraphilias and psychological conditions that are considered risk factors for sexual offending. In the present study we sought to compare the stigma attached to pedophilia with attitudes towards sexual sadism and antisocial tendencies (Study 1, N = 720) and with attitudes towards...

The term viewing time (VT) effect refers to a phenomenon whereby respondents typically take longer to judge the sexual attractiveness of targets from sexually preferred (versus nonpreferred) categories. Although frequently characterized as an unobtrusive measure of respondents’ sexually motivated reactions to the stimulus images themselves, the typ...

Workplace bullying is a phenomenon that can have serious detrimental effects on health, work-related attitudes, and the behavior of the target. Particularly, workplace bullying exposure has been linked to lower level of general well-being, job satisfaction, vigor, and performance and higher level of burnout, workplace deviance, and turnover intenti...

The Explicit and Implicit Sexual Interest Profile (EISIP; Banse, Schmidt, & Clarbour, 2010) is a multimethod measure of sexual interest in children and adults. It combines indirect latency-based measures such as the Implicit Association Test (IAT), Viewing Time (VT) and explicit self-report measures. This study examined test-retest reliability and...

Content‐based techniques for credibility assessment (Criteria‐Based Content Analysis [CBCA], Reality Monitoring [RM]) have been shown to distinguish between experience‐based and fabricated statements in previous meta‐analyses. New simulations raised the question whether these results are reliable revealing that biased data sets lead to false‐positi...

Purpose. The present study aimed to investigate the main effect of competition on workplace bullying (WB) exposure and perpetration as well as its hypothesized moderation through passive avoidant leadership style. Specifically, we hypothesized that competition would have a stronger influence on WB when supervisors score higher on passive avoidant l...

Personen mit pädophilen Neigungen müssen ihre sexuellen Impulse lebenslang kontrollieren. Die Stigmatisierung Betroffener stellt eine zusätzliche psychische Belastung dar, die das Risiko eines Übergriffs erhöhen kann. Hier setzen Präventionsangebote an, deren Wirksamkeit Gegenstand eines kürzlich abgeschlossenen Forschungsprojektes ist.

Les personnes ayant des penchants pédophiles doivent maîtriser leurs pulsions sexuelles tout au long de leur vie. La stigmatisation de ces personnes représente une pression psychologique supplémentaire qui peut augmenter le risque de passage à l’acte. C’est là qu’interviennent les offres de prévention, dont l’efficacité a fait l’objet d'un projet d...

Shame and guilt are vital in borderline personality disorder (BPD), and research using explicit measures has consistently found elevated levels of these self-conscious emotions (SCE) in those with BPD. However, these measures cannot elucidate implicit processes that are equally important as they guide the perceptions of the self and influence behav...

Background: The five-item World Health Organization Well-Being Index (WHO-5) is a frequently used brief standard measure in large-scale cross-cultural clinical studies. Despite its frequent use, some psychometric questions remain that concern the choice of an adequate item response theory (IRT) model, the evaluation of reliability at important cuto...

Comprehensive electronical supplement for Sischka, Costa, Steffgen, & Schmidt (in press)

Technical report for the Swiss government on "Secondary prevention offers and their effectiveness for individuals with sexual interest in children". The report is written in German but contains extended summaries in English, French, and Italian languages. For more information refer to: https://www.admin.ch/gov/de/start/dokumentation/medienmitteilu...

Technical report for the Swiss government on "Secondary prevention offers and their effectiveness for individuals with sexual interest in children". The report is written in German but contains extended summaries in English, French, and Italian languages. For more information refer to: https://www.admin.ch/gov/de/start/dokumentation/medienmitteilu...

Technical report for the Swiss government on "Secondary prevention offers and their effectiveness for individuals with sexual interest in children". The report is written in German but contains extended summaries in English, French, and Italian languages. For more information refer to: https://www.admin.ch/gov/de/start/dokumentation/medienmitteilu...

Technical report for the Swiss government on "Secondary prevention offers and their effectiveness for individuals with sexual interest in children". The report is written in German but contains extended summaries in English, French, and Italian languages. For more information refer to: https://www.admin.ch/gov/de/start/dokumentation/medienmitteilu...

The Explicit and Implicit Sexual Interest Profile (EISIP; Banse, Schmidt & Clarbour, 2010) is a multimethod assessment battery of sexual interest in children and adults. It combines conceptually different indirect latency-based measures such as Implicit Association Tests (IAT) and Viewing Time (VT) assessments as well as explicit self-report measur...

Mit der Novellierung des § 63 StGB geht ein deutlicher Anstieg der erforderlichen kriminalprognostischen Gutachten einher. Dem steht eine vergleichsweise kleine Anzahl Sachverständiger gegenüber, wodurch sich Engpässe in der Gutachtenerstellung ergeben. Dies führt zu langen Wartezeiten, teilweise bis zu einem Jahr, die mit dem Verhältnismäßigkeitsg...

It is almost a cultural truism that erotic images attract our attention, presumably because paying attention to erotic stimuli provided our ancestors with mating benefits. Attention however, can be narrowly defined as visuospatial attention (keeping such stimuli in view) or more broadly as cognitive attention (such stimuli taking up one's thoughts)...

In the present study we have taken a novel approach in confession research to investigate and compare situational as well as individual risk factors among false confessors and true deniers among imprisoned offenders who all had been falsely accused by the police. Furthermore, we report first data on self-reported false confession rates among German...

Divergenzen um die Kompetenzabgrenzung bei psychowissenschaftlichen forensischen Sachverständigen zwischen verschiedenen aber auch innerhalb relevanter Berufsgruppen führen zu Schwierigkeiten für Richter bei der Sachverständigenauswahl. Es stellt sich die Frage, welche Qualifikationen und Kompetenzen von einem forensisch-psychologischen Sachverstän...

Background: Aggressiveness resulting from inappropriately intense anger plays a major role in borderline personality disorder (BPD) and research using self-report measures has consistently found elevated levels of aggression in this condition. However, while self-report assesses explicit dimensions of the self-concept, it cannot elucidate implicit...

Die wohl einflussreichsten und meistdiskutierten Modelle zur Rehabilitation von Straftätern sind in der aktuellen Literatur das Risk-Needs-Responsivity Modell (RNR; Andrews, Bonta, & Hoge, 1990; Bonta & Andrews, 2017) und das später entwickelte Good-Lives Model (GLM; Ward, 2002; Ward, Mann, & Gannon, 2007). Beide Modelle nehmen für sich in Anspruch...

Based on recent findings that interrogator intonation can enhance interrogative suggestibility during recall phases, the present study tested influences of interrogator intonation on memory performance even as early as at the encoding stage. We experimentally manipulated interrogator intonation during encoding of a story to be recalled in immediate...

Reports an error in "Validity of content-based techniques to distinguish true and fabricated statements: A meta-analysis" by Verena A. Oberlader, Christoph Naefgen, Judith Koppehele-Gossel, Laura Quinten, Rainer Banse and Alexander F. Schmidt (Law and Human Behavior, 2016[Aug], Vol 40[4], 440-457). During an update of this meta-analysis it became a...

Workplace mobbing has various negative consequences for targeted individuals and is costly to organizations. At present it is debated whether gender, age, or occupation are potential risk factors. However, empirical data remain inconclusive as measures of workplace mobbing so far lack of measurement invariance (MI) testing – a prerequisite for mean...

As editors of European Psychologist, the authors' shared interest in the division between empirical data and regular practice was the starting point for the present Special Section on recent advances in criminal psychology. The authors wanted to showcase research which they saw as having a direct implication for criminal justice practice. They note...

Das zentrale Ziel des Strafvollzuges in Deutschland ist es, Strafgefangene zu befähigen, ein Leben ohne Straftaten zu führen. Zu diesem Zweck sieht das Strafvollzugsgesetz die Behandlung von Gefangenen im Vollzug bzw. in einer sozialtherapeutischen Anstalt vor. Aus ethischen und sicherheitspolitischen Gründen sowie aufgrund von Kosten-Nutzen Erwägu...

Over the last decades several attempts in developing incrementally valid risk indicators above and beyond standard actuarial and dynamic risk assessment instruments have been undertaken without much success. The current review will summarize current developments regarding the validity of detailed crime scene analysis for forensic assessments of sex...

We developed a cued pro- and antisaccade paradigm (CPAP) to explore automatic components of sexual interest. Heterosexual participants (n = 32 women, n = 25 men) had to perform fast eye movements towards and away from sexually relevant or irrelevant stimuli across a congruent (i.e. prosaccade towards sexually relevant stimuli, antisaccade away from...

On surveys that assess sensitive personal attributes, indirect questioning aims at increasing respondents’ willingness to answer truthfully by protecting confidentiality. However, the assumption that subjects understand questioning procedures fully and trust them to protect their privacy is tested rarely. In a scenario-based design, we compared fou...

An association between experiences of sexual abuse in one’s childhood (ECSA), and sexual offending against children in adult age has been established in several studies. The aim of the present study was to further elucidate this link. First, we explored whether ECSA predicted different types of adult sexual offending against children (hands-on, chi...

Background and objectives: Cognitive models of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) highlight the role of cognitive biases for the development of the disorder. One of these biases, an inflated sense of responsibility has been associated with higher anger scores and latent aggression on self-report scales, especially in patients with compulsive check...

Background and objectives Cognitive models of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) highlight the role of cognitive biases for the development of the disorder. One of these biases, an inflated sense of responsibility has been associated with higher anger scores and latent aggression on self-report scales, especially in patients with compulsive checki...

Although aggressive behavior is socially highly undesirable, it is prevalent in contemporary societies as well as human history and media portrayals of human interactions. The insight that lashing out aggressively does not only have severe negative consequences for the target of this behavior but also for the actor likely leads to the valid conclus...

Due to unobtrusiveness and ease of implementation, viewing time (VT) measures of sexual interest in children have sparked increasing research interest in forensic contexts over the last two decades. The current study presents two meta-analyses of VT measures adapted to assess pedophilic interest to determine their discrimination between sexual offe...

Commentary on Seto, M. C. (2016). The puzzle of male chronophilias. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 46, 3-22. doi: 10.1007/s10508-016-0799-y