Raymond A Knight

Brandeis University · Department of Psychology

The current study explored the relations between patient characteristics and psychopathic traits in predicting treatment involvement. We rated treatment involvement using detailed archival clinical files of 218 individuals committed to the Massachusetts Treatment Center (MTC). Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) scores had been rated from a previ...

Among the multiple controversies surrounding hypersexuality is the important issue of whether it constitutes a univocal construct. Although an initial study supported its homogeneity, more resent research has identified two separate subcomponents—problematic sexuality and sexual drive. The present survey study addressed this issue in a sample that...

Objective: We examined how the age of the victim influences the public’s risk assessment and punishment attitudes for individuals who have sexually offended and whether actuarial feedback influences these ratings. Hypotheses: (1) Risk ratings for child victim vignettes would be higher than ratings for adult victim vignettes. This effect would be dr...

In recent years, a lot of interest has been devoted to the study of sexual coercion. Although the definition varies across studies, sexual coercion is generally defined as the employment of tactics to obtain sexual activity against freely given consent. Several measures of sexual coercion exist, however those measures present some methodological li...

Psychopathy included in Knight & Sims-Knight (2003, 2004)'s etiological models of sexual coercion, callousness, and PPI self-centered impulsivity were examined as potential predictors of paraphilic coercion. Relationships are illustrated while hierarchical regression revealed gender difference among university students. Findings emphasize the relev...

This study examines the characteristics of youths convicted of sexual crimes (YSC) and youths convicted of non-sexual crimes (YNSC) to create an inclusive typology of clinical characteristics associated with sexual and general delinquency. The sample consisted of 391 justice-involved male youths aged 14–20. Participants completed either the Multidi...

Public and clinician attitudes are important to consider when studying the reentry of individuals who sexually offend. Uninformed public attitudes drive the continued use of ineffective policies like registries and residential restrictions in the United States, and experts must assess risk to decide what level of supervision and control to recommen...

The Screening Scale of Pedophilic Crime Scene Behavior (SSPC) is a seven-item structured rating scale assessing pedophilic sexual arousal. In the current study, we cross-validated the scale’s convergent validity using multiple measures of sexual interest in children (clinical diagnosis of pedophilia, the high fixation/low social competence type of...

Most child sexual abuse (CSA) remains unreported and undetected. Despite this, much of what we know about perpetrators of CSA is derived from samples of convicted CSA offenders. Significant knowledge gaps remain about those who have evaded detection. This study addresses this gap with an in-depth content analysis of the case files of ten convicted...

Statement of Purpose Loneliness is a particularly problematic consequence of peer victimization, due to its relation to poor psychological outcomes and later victimization. Friendship quality has been found to mediate and moderate relations between types of bullying victimization and psychological outcomes, but little research has examined multiple...

This study examined whether pedophilia is best understood as a dimension or a discrete class (taxon). We considered pedophilia to include both physical sexual attraction to children as well as emotional attraction to children and childhood. Archival data from 901 adult males from a U.S. civil commitment treatment center for sexually dangerous perso...

Purpose of Review A substantial increase in research on the structure, covariates, and etiology of hypersexuality has emerged during the last decade. It is the goal of this review to summarize and integrate this research and to indicate some practical implications for clinical and forensic practice, especially as applied to those who have sexually...

The current study explored the association between psychopathic traits and release suitability decisions and examined the role of Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) and Static-99 in predicting general and sexual recidivism. The sample included 207 adult male sex offenders involved in the long-term follow-up at the Massachusetts Treatment Center...

The attitudes of both the public and of clinicians are important to consider when studying the reentry of sexual offenders into society. Punitive public attitudes drive the continued use of ineffective policies like registries and residential restrictions, and experts must assess risk to decide what level of supervision and control, from none to ci...

DeMatteo et al. (2020b) published a Statement in this journal declaring that the Psychopathy Checklist—Revised (PCL–R) “cannot and should not [emphasis added]” (p. 134) be used in U.S. capital-sentencing cases to assess risk for serious institutional violence. Their stated concerns were the “imperfect interrater reliability” (p. 137), the “variabil...

A group of 13 authors (GA) shared a statement of concern (SoC) warning against the use of the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R; Hare, 1991, 2003) to assess risk for serious institutional violence in U.S. capital sentencing cases (DeMatteo et al., 2020). Notably, the SoC was not confined to capital sentencing issues, but included institutio...

Purpose: It has been hypothesized that paraphilic coercive disorder (PCD) constitutes a distinct preference for coercion that can be discriminated from a preference for sadism. Despite the repeated rejections of PCD as an acceptable diagnosis, it continues to be used. In 2013 Knight and colleagues reviewed the evidence that had been proffered to su...

Sexual sadism has been included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) since the mid‐20th century. The DSM‐5 committee distinguished between sadistic behaviors on consenting partners and nonconsenting persons. The lack of consensus on the diagnostic criteria for sexual sadism is in part responsible for the poor inter‐rat...

Positive and warm parental attitudes are associated with better social and emotional child functioning, whereas negative or rejecting parental attitudes are associated with poor outcomes, such as aggression, impaired self-esteem, and emotional instability. The current study investigated the reliability and validity of scores on an interview adaptat...

Comprehensive reply to DeMatteo et al. 2020 in Psychology, Public Policy & Law provides evidence for the reliability and validity of the PCL-R in the assessment of risk for institutional violence.

This study examined the association of sexually appetitive fantasies and sexually coercive behaviors among adult men convicted of nonsexual crimes ( n = 159) and adult men with no criminal histories ( n = 219). Individuals completed the Multidimensional Assessment of Sex and Aggression (MASA) and, on the basis of these reports, were classified whet...

Psychological abuse and sexual abuse, either alone or in combination, have been implicated as developmental antecedents of problematic sexual thoughts and behaviors in studies of sexually aggressive males (Jesperson, Lalumière, & Seto, 2009; Knight & Sims-Knight, 2011; Levenson & Grady, 2016; Seto & Lalumière, 2010). Recently, psychological abuse p...

Background: Although research on the developmental antecedents of sexual offending has tended to focus on sexual abuse, recent research in juveniles and adults who have sexually offended suggests that psychological abuse perpetrated by a male caregiver may be a particularly important factor in the development of problematic sexual interests and be...

It has been hypothesized that paraphilic coercive disorder (PC+) constitutes a distinct preference for coercive sexual intercourse that can be discriminated from a preference for sadism (Thornton, 2010). Recent data have indicated that sadism is an endpoint on an Agonistic Continuum that range from noncoercive sexual fantasies and behaviours, throu...

Whereas risk assessment literature on sexual offending has primarily focused on prediction of subsequent sexual crimes, and not the severity of those crimes, the first aim of the present study was to identify variables that predict the amount of damage to victims in sexual crimes compared with those that predict general aggressiveness. The second a...

This book provides the first systematic overview of the theoretical, empirical, clinical, and police issues related to sexual murderers and murder. Bringing together leading researchers, theoreticians, and practitioners from across eight different countries, this is a truly international collaboration and an essential reference text for students, r...

Although adults who have sexually offended against both child and adult victims (i.e., adults with mixed aged sexual offense victims [MASOVs]) have been found at increased risk to reoffend, they have been a neglected and rarely studied group of individuals who have sexually offended. The present study explored their differentiating characteristics...

Severe sexual sadism is a disorder of sexualpreferences that focuses on humiliation and domination of thevictim, sometimes causing grievous injury or death. Becauseoffenders with high levels of sadism represent a risk to bothreoffend and cause considerable harm should they reoffend, adiagnosis of sexual sadism has serious implications. Theactualdia...

Sexual sadism can be described as the experience of sexual pleasure produced by acts of cruelty and bodily punishment (Krafft-Ebing, 1886). Sadists are usually described as a discrete class of people that commit serious crimes and present a high risk of recidivism. Although various explanations of the etiology of sexual sadism have been proposed, v...

Sadism was initially described as the experience of sexual pleasure produced by acts of cruelty and bodily punishment. Sadism was conceptualized as if sadists were fundamentally different from nonsadists. Recent studies have suggested that sadism is distributed as a dimension rather than as a category. The aim of the current study was to assess the...

Purpose According to the rational choice approach, offenders consider costs and benefits when making decisions. This study applies this framework to sexual offenses and examines how various decisions made by perpetrators of sexual crimes influenced the desired and undesired crime outcomes that resulted. Methods The study examines 2296 crimes of a...

The current study employed both latent variable- and person-centered approaches to examine psychopathic traits in a large sample of sex offenders (N = 958). The offenders, who had committed a range of sexual crimes, had been assessed with the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R; Hare, 2003). Structural equation modeling results indicated that the...

Explorations of the factor structure of common actuarials used for risk assessment for adults who sexually offend have led to the identification of consistent, core underlying dynamic constructs. The present study generalizes this research strategy to juveniles, examining the factor structure of the Juvenile Sexual Offense Recidivism Risk Assessmen...

Hypersexuality, or extreme normophilic sexual urges and behaviors, is a controversial construct that was recently considered as a candidate disorder for the DSM-5 and was rejected. It was also rejected for inclusion in Section III (Conditions for Further Study). Nonetheless, it has been found to be an important predictor of recidivism among sex off...

Recent studies concerned with latent structure suggest that sexual sadism represents a dimensional construct rather than a categorical entity. The goal of the present study was to investigate the latent structure of sadism with taxometric procedures on a sample of 474 sexual offenders. Taxometric analyses yielded unambiguously dimensional results.

The Massachusetts Treatment Center typology research programme combined rational and empirical research strategies in an iterative process to generate, test, and revise typological models of rape. The most recent rapist typology generated by this programme is the Massachusetts Treatment Center Rapist Typology, Version 4 (MTC:R4). In parallel with t...

Sexual sadism can be described as the experience of sexual pleasure produced by acts of cruelty and bodily punishment (Krafft-Ebing, 1886). Sadists are usually described as a discrete class of people that commit serious crimes and present a high risk of recidivism. Depending on the study, between 5% and 50% of sexual offenders are considered sadist...

Alors que le vieillissement entraînerait une diminution du risque de récidive chez les agresseurs sexuels, le niveau de risque mesuré par les instruments actuariels vi dans le sens inverse. La présente étude vise à évaluer l’impact de l’âge lors de la libération sur les taux de récidive sexuelle et la validité prédictive de six instruments (VRAG, S...

Prior taxometric research on child molesters and general sex offenders has produced inconsistent and contradictory results. There are theoretical, practical, and policy reasons, however, to assume that a psychopathy taxon may exist in sex offenders and that a taxometric study might shed light on this issue. The mean above minus below a cut (MAMBAC)...

This study looked at PPI self centered impulsivity and callousness and whether they added variance to Knight and Sims-Knight (2003, 2004)’s model of predictors of sexual coercion among male and female college students. Hierarchal regressions were conducted and revealed significant difference in predictors among college males and females. The result...

While aging is supposed to reduce the risk of recidivism among sex offenders, the risk level measured by an instrument should rather increase with age. This study aims to evaluate the impact of age at release on sexual recidivism rates and the predictive validity of six instruments (VRAG, SORAG, RRASOR, Static-99, Static -2002 and MnSOST-R) for 372...

The present study explored the effects of child sexual abuse (CSA) on the adaptation of male juveniles who subsequently sexually offended (JSOs; n = 178; age, M = 16.05 years, SD = 0.27, range = 12-22). It examined multiple levels of interpersonal closeness between the perpetrators of sexual abuse and their JSO victims. JSOs who were sexually abuse...

The etiology of psychopathy remains poorly understood, despite the wealth of studies focused on examining this serious and complex personality disorder. The present study explored the contribution of psychological, physical, and sexual abuse in predicting PCL-R facet and total scores. The study was conducted on a sample of 397 adult male sexual off...

Sexual sadism can be described as the experience of sexual pleasure produced by acts of cruelty and bodily punishment (Krafft-Ebing, 1886). This can also be an innate desire to humiliate, hurt, hit, or even destroy others to experience sexual pleasure.

The recent attempt to introduce hypersexual disorder into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5), has increased empirical scrutiny of the construct. Consensus on its definition and underlying structure remains elusive. Whereas some conceptualizations favor a categorical latent structure, others speculate th...

This study was designed to compare the Adam Walsh Act (AWA) classification tiers with actuarial risk assessment instruments and existing state classification schemes in their respective abilities to identify sex offenders at high risk to re-offend. Data from 1,789 adult sex offenders released from prison in four states were collected (Minnesota, Ne...

Using the overarching framework of the risk/needs/responsivity principles of Andrews and Bonta (2006), this chapter identifies the criminogenic needs that have been emerged most consistently as treatment targets for juveniles who have sexually offended (JSOs). Empirical studies supporting the selection of each domain are presented and the assessmen...

Although psychopathy has consistently been shown to distribute as a dimension, all prior studies have examined behavioral indicators that may be phenotypically distant from core biological correlates of the syndrome. The current studies attempted to determine whether biomarkers from a high-resolution structural MRI scan of selected limbic and paral...

sadism can be described as the experience of sexual pleasure produced by acts of cruelty and bodily punishment (Krafft-Ebing, 1886). This can also be an innate desire to humiliate, hurt, hit, or even destroy others to experience sexual pleasure. Perceived as a disease, sadism has been conceptualized as if sadists were fundamentally different from n...

It has been suggested that child sexual abuse is related to poor attachment to parents, which is associated with an inability to form intimate relationships. Seto and Lalumière indicated that there were too few studies of adolescent males to determine whether poor attachment was associated with perpetration. This study was designed to follow up on...

One of the most important clinical features of psychopaths is their differential emotional response style. The present study examined the modulating effect of negative mood induction on the processing of emotional information and its relation to psychopathy. The sample of 105 participants were randomly assigned to two types of mood induction condit...

Research in the field of sexual aggression often assumes escalation in the criminal careers of sexual offenders. Sexual offenders are thought to begin their criminal careers with non-contact sexual offenses or non-sexual offenses and then escalate to more serious crimes, specifically sexual violence. The commission of one crime in particular-burgla...

The present study investigated rationality in sexually motivated burglaries. Specifically, we analyzed the situational cues identified by sexual burglars in their target selection. The research project investigated 224 individual incidents of residential burglary with apparent sexual motivations. Situational characteristics of the incidents were re...

Sexual sadism and psychopathy have been theoretically, clinically, and empirically linked to violence. Although both constructs are linked to predatory violence, few studies have sought to explore the covariation of the two constructs, and even fewer have sought to conceptualize the similarities of violence prediction in each. The current study con...

This article describes the construction and testing of a newly designed instrument to assess psychological factors associated with increased rates of sexual recidivism. The new instrument (Structured Risk Assessment-Forensic Version or SRA-FV) was based on previous research using the SRA framework. This article describes the results of testing SRA-...

Sexual sadism can be described as the experience of sexual pleasure produced by acts of cruelty and bodily punishment (Krafft-Ebing, 1886). Sadists are usually described as a discrete class of people, committing serious crimes and presenting a high risk of recidivism. Perceived as a disease which one can or cannot have, sadism was conceptualized an...

Policies aimed at managing high-risk offenders, which include sex offenders, often assume they are a homogeneous population. These policies also tend to assume the pattern of offending is the same for all sex offenders, and is stable. This study challenges these assumptions by examining the life course offending trajectories of 780 convicted adult...

Purpose: It has been hypothesized that paraphilic coercive disorder (PCD) constitutes a distinct sexual preference for the coercive elements of sexual interactions and that this preference can be discriminated from a sexual pref- erence for violence, harm, and injury. This article critically reviews the evidence that has been marshaled to sup- port...

Clinicians have at their disposal a variety of instruments with which to evaluate the risk presented by sex offenders. These measures yield similar predictive potency, and combining them does not appear to enhance prediction. The present study examined whether classification and regression tree analysis could identify new combinations of predictors...

Purpose: To understand fully the nature of residential burglary one must examine the situational context, and offender's behavior during the burglary. Although several behaviors appear to be distinctly related to sexual burglaries, including voyeurism, fetishism, sexual violence, and sexual murder, a systematic typology of the characteristics of re...

Commission of nonsexual crimes generally antedates officially recorded sexual offenses. In particular, burglary has been hypothesized to be a potential ‘stepping stone’ in the development of one's sexual criminal career in the same way that marijuana has often been considered a ‘gateway drug’ to more serious drug-related offenses. The present study...

This study investigated substance use in rape and child molestation. We hypothesized that perpetrator substance use would be associated with a greater increase in rapists' aggression in sexual crimes compared with that of child molesters. We also predicted that victim substance use would be negatively related to both rapists and child molesters' ag...

Numerous instruments are available to clinicians for evaluating sex offenders' reoffense risk. Although they have demon-strated effectiveness in predicting recidivism significantly better than unstructured clinical evaluation, little is known about their predictive accuracy in subgroups of sexual offenders or in the long term. This study was undert...

The perceptual bias for sexual material has been explored mainly in normal men, and to date little attention has been paid to sexually aggressive men. The current study compared performance of sexually aggressive and nonaggressive men on experimental tasks involving sexual stimuli. Participants viewed the visual images (neutral or sexual), and, dep...

Hypersexual Disorder is currently being considered for inclusion in the DSM-5. To inform this process, we investigated the latent structure of the hypersexuality construct using Meehl's (1995) taxometric method. Data on sexual interests and behaviors were obtained from 2,101 general population males and females in Sweden and 716 male sex offenders...

Recent research has suggested that a qualitatively distinct subtype of psychopathic sex offender can be identified via taxometric analyses (Harris et al., 2007). In this study we attempted to replicate the hypothesized psychopathic sexuality taxon in a group of 503 male sexual offenders using data from the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R:Hare,...

Offense specialization and versatility has been explored previously in the prior criminal records of sexual offenders. The present study expanded these findings by examining offense specialization and versatility in the postrelease offending of a sample of sexual offenders referred for civil commitment and released. Criminal versatility (not limiti...

Although it has been hypothesised that schizophrenia patients have a perceptual organisation deficit, recent work indicates that their ability to process highly configural stimuli with continuous or near continuous contour is intact. To clarify further the range of the perceptual organisation dysfunction in schizophrenia, we assessed, using Kahnema...

The purpose of this study was to test whether prior conduct disorder increased deviance in persons diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder. One hundred and three male inmates satisfying adult antisocial and conduct disorder criteria for antisocial personality disorder achieved significantly higher scores on self-report measures of criminal t...

The taxometric method effectively distinguishes between dimensional (1-class) and taxonic (2-class) latent structure, but there is virtually no information on how it responds to polytomous (3-class) latent structure. A Monte Carlo analysis showed that the mean comparison curve fit index (CCFI; Ruscio, Haslam, & Ruscio, 2006) obtained with 3 taxomet...

Résumé Un large éventail d’instruments s’offre aux cliniciens pour évaluer le risque que posent les délinquants sexuels. La présente étude vise à comparer la validité prédictive de huit instruments (VRAG, SORAG, RRASOR, Statique-99, Statique-2002, RM2000, MnSOST–R et SVR-20) et un outil de référence (PCL-R) selon quatre types de récidive (nuisance...