Emotional congruence with children and sexual offending against children: A meta-analytic review.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: Emotional congruence with children is an exaggerated affective and cognitive affiliation with children that is posited to be involved in the initiation and maintenance of sexual offending against children. The current meta-analysis examined the relationship between emotional congruence with children and sexual offending against children, sexual recidivism, and change following sexual offender treatment. METHOD: A systematic literature review of online academic databases, conference proceedings, governmental agency websites, and article, book chapter, and book reference lists was performed. Thirty studies on emotional congruence with children in sexual offenders against children (SOC) were included in a random-effects meta-analysis. RESULTS: Extrafamilial SOC-especially those with male victims--evidenced higher emotional congruence with children than most non--SOC comparison groups and intrafamilial SOC. In contrast, intrafamilial SOC evidenced less emotional congruence with children than many of the non-SOC comparison groups. Higher levels of emotional congruence with children were associated with moderately higher rates of sexual recidivism. The association between emotional congruence with children and sexual recidivism was significantly stronger in extrafamilial SOC samples (d = 0.58, 95% CI [0.31, 0.85]) compared with intrafamilial SOC samples (d = -0.15, 95% CI [-0.58, 0.27]). Similarly, emotional congruence with children showed a significant reduction from pre- to posttreatment for extrafamilial SOC (d = 0.41, 95% CI [0.33, 0.85]), but not for intrafamilial SOC (d = 0.06, 95% CI [-0.10, 0.22]). CONCLUSIONS: Emotional congruence with children is a characteristic of extrafamilial SOC, is moderately predictive of sexual recidivism, and is potentially amenable through treatment efforts.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.006 | 0.016 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".