NCT03825627

From Attention to Behavior: Increasing Behavioral Inhibition

From Attention to Behavior: Increasing Behavioral Inhibition Through Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation in Pedophilia

• Status: Unknown
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 76 (estimated)
• Sponsor: University of Zurich · Academic / Other
• Sex: Male
• Age: 18 Years – 65 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

This project will investigate if transcranial direct current stimulation can be used as treatment for Pedophilia. Treatment efficacy will be evaluated with behavioral tasks and the recording of eye-movement.

Detailed description

Pedophilia is an important motivation for sexual offenses involving children, including child pornography and sexual contacts with children (henceforth, pedosexual behavior). Indeed, approximately half of individuals convicted for sexual offenses against children have a Pedophilic disorder and offenders with a Pedophilic disorder are much more likely to sexually reoffend. A promising line of research has examined the neurocognitive basis of pedophilia. Pedophilic individuals display altered activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) when attending to child-related stimuli. This brain area is involved in the cognitive control of sexual arousal. Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) has been examined as a non-invasive method to increase activity in the dlPCF, ultimately increasing inhibitory control over impulses. Accumulating evidence also shows that individuals have an attentional bias towards sexually preferred stimuli. These attentional processes can be investigated by recording eye movements. Early automatic eye movements are particularly relevant in discriminating individuals with pedophilia from those without pedophilia. The proposed study will examine the effects of tDCS over the dlPFC of pedophilic individuals and healthy controls, while they complete a task requiring controlled attention to virtual (computer-generated) images of children and adults. In two separate sessions, participants will be randomly assigned to an active and a placebo (sham) tDCS condition. Eye movements will be recorded during the task. The investigators expect to observe a conflict between automatic and controlled attention when participants are presented with their sexually preferred stimuli. Specifically, the investigators expect pedophiles to show an attentional bias towards virtual child stimuli. The investigators predict that the attentional conflict will be reduced when tDCS is applied, compared to the sham condition. If the attentional bias is a key cognitive feature of sexual interest, the investigators expect to measure changes in reported or indirectly assessed sexual preferences.

Conditions

• Pedophilia

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
DEVICE	Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation	Conductive saline-soaked rubber electrodes super-imposed on sponge plates will be placed on the scalp at F3 (active electrode, 4.4×4.4cm) and on the contralateral supraorbital area (reference electrode, 5.1×10.2cm). Stimulation will be applied using a battery-driven constant-current regulator (Oasis Pro, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada). For each stimulation, the direct current is initially increased in a ramp-like fashion over 10 s until reaching 2 milliampere (mA) and will be similarly decreased at the end of stimulation. In the active tDCS condition, stimulation will be maintained for 20 min; in the sham condition, it will be turned off after 15 s of stimulation, with a ramp-up/down of 10 s (i.e., 35 s total).

Timeline

• Start date: 2019-06-01
• Primary completion: 2020-10-01
• Completion: 2020-12-31
• First posted: 2019-01-31
• Last updated: 2019-08-13

Locations

1 site across 1 country: Switzerland