Abstract

Investigating sex interest, including deviant
preferences, can be troublesome, mainly because of the methods chosen
for assessment. Self-report and objective measures are invaluable to
this research, however self-report is subject to socially desirable
responding and phallometry is prone to faking and can be invasive
(Kalmus & Beech, 2005). Consequently, more reliable and less invasive
methods, commonly termed indirect measures have been developed
(Snowden et al., 2011). However, most of these measures are still in
their infancy, difficult to implement in practice, and only provide a
single outcome variable (e.g., response-latency).

Thus, in order to amalgamate the positives of the aforementioned
methods, and lessen their limitations, a new tablet PC application
(M-TASI; Multimodal Tablet for Assessing Sexual Interest) has been
developed for use in an academic capacity, by drawing upon previous
research (Hofmann et al., 2009; Kraus & Hofmann, 2014).

Participants must ‘swipe’ sexually relevant stimuli towards or
away from them in an approach or avoidance procedure, respectively.
Approach-avoidance procedures have been deemed viable in sexuality
research (Hofmann et al., 2009), yet there is no evidence of using a
tablet-based approach-avoidance paradigm to investigate human
sexuality, thus the M-TASI could contribute to filing this dearth in
the literature.

A pilot study has been conducted to test the viability of the method,
focusing on variables such as ‘swipe speed’, response time and
location of first touch. These results will be discussed.

This research will, hopefully, give credence to using this methodology
in future, and could be applied to deviant sex interest.