Bibliographic record
Abstract
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 dimensional latent structure and can be accurately characterised as continua.One exception to this general rule is human sexual attraction.Within this area of psychological science, the status of sexual preference for children over adults is contested, with different studies suggesting varying latent structures.Using a large sample of males living in the community (N = 8,776), the current research aims to provide a robust evaluation of the latent structure of sexual maturity interests.Evidence for a three-taxa latent structure was confirmed in the sample.This study demonstrates human sexual maturity preference is populated with categorical constructs and has wide-ranging implications for future research in this area. Statement of RelevanceSexual attraction is central to how we understand ourselves and orients sexual behavior throughout the lifespan.The structure of individual differences in sexual attractions tells us whether people differ from each other as a matter of degree or as a matter of kind.The current research examines individual differences in sexual attraction to children and adults in a large sample of males.Results show these sexual attractions exist in three categories, with men showing preferential attractions to adults, attractions to both adults and children, or preferential attractions to children.The boundaries between these three attraction patterns are discrete.This understanding will inform how psychological scientists examine etiological causes and clinical and psychosocial correlates of sexual attraction to children.These results provide further evidence that sexual maturity preference is categorical, a rather rare occurrence among psychological constructs, and elucidate the potential of categorical structures consisting of more than two categories.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.003 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.574 | 0.429 |
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".