These are the latest result from our research in our lab:
Trialling Educational Modules to Reduce Stigma Towards People with a Sexual Attraction to Children
Conflating sexual attraction to children with sexual offending against children results in a widespread misunderstanding of this involuntary attraction as equivalent to abuse. People who experience this attraction face stigmatisation that impacts their mental health, relationships, and attraction-related help-seeking. This stigma also hinders public support for perpetrator-focused child sexual abuse prevention. Prior stigma-reduction interventions have produced generally positive, albeit mixed results on shifting attitudes. Notably, prior interventions have only used single sessions, despite evidence that spaced learning, with frequent study sessions, leads to better knowledge retention.
This study applied spaced learning to a unique anti-stigma intervention to compare this approach to a single session intervention. 58 members of the general public were surveyed on how they felt about people who experience a sexual attraction to children, and were then provided with educational content about this attraction. Afterwards, the participants repeated the survey to see whether their attitudes had changed after viewing the educational content. The participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups: those who received the key content on one day (and filler content on other days), and those who received the key content spread over a week. We expected to see that viewing the content over a week would lead to more positive changes in participants' attitudes toward people who feel this attraction.
We found that after seeing the content, participants in both groups held less punitive views towards people who feel this attraction (that is, they felt less that people who feel this way should be punished solely for having these feelings). Participants also had less belief that feeling this attraction is intentional or makes someone inherently dangerous. What we understood from these results is that after viewing the educational content, participants held less stigmatising views towards people with this attraction, regardless of how the content was provided. These are only a few of the concepts that the surveys measured, but these are the ones that changed after the content was given. Alongside this, older age correlated with more stigmatising attitudes, which is inconsistent with prior research and indicates a characteristic that should be further investigated in relation to stigma reduction. Furthermore, the degree of attention paid to the modules affected attitude change positively - another area in need of further research to determine the stability of this finding.
Comparing this study with prior research showed how different intervention content and presentation styles differently affect attitude change. These comparisons present important considerations for future studies that use anti-stigma interventions, to ensure these are being designed in the most effective ways. Finally, the public response to this study suggests a disconnect between academic and layperson’s understandings of “stigma reduction”. This indicates the need for transparency and clarity in communicating this and similar research, as well as a wider addressing of the stigma surrounding child sexual abuse, to effectively prevent this abuse.
[updated 14 November 2025]
Conflating sexual attraction to children with sexual offending against children results in a widespread misunderstanding of this involuntary attraction as equivalent to abuse. People who experience this attraction face stigmatisation that impacts their mental health, relationships, and attraction-related help-seeking. This stigma also hinders public support for perpetrator-focused child sexual abuse prevention. Prior stigma-reduction interventions have produced generally positive, albeit mixed results on shifting attitudes. Notably, prior interventions have only used single sessions, despite evidence that spaced learning, with frequent study sessions, leads to better knowledge retention.
This study applied spaced learning to a unique anti-stigma intervention to compare this approach to a single session intervention. 58 members of the general public were surveyed on how they felt about people who experience a sexual attraction to children, and were then provided with educational content about this attraction. Afterwards, the participants repeated the survey to see whether their attitudes had changed after viewing the educational content. The participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups: those who received the key content on one day (and filler content on other days), and those who received the key content spread over a week. We expected to see that viewing the content over a week would lead to more positive changes in participants' attitudes toward people who feel this attraction.
We found that after seeing the content, participants in both groups held less punitive views towards people who feel this attraction (that is, they felt less that people who feel this way should be punished solely for having these feelings). Participants also had less belief that feeling this attraction is intentional or makes someone inherently dangerous. What we understood from these results is that after viewing the educational content, participants held less stigmatising views towards people with this attraction, regardless of how the content was provided. These are only a few of the concepts that the surveys measured, but these are the ones that changed after the content was given. Alongside this, older age correlated with more stigmatising attitudes, which is inconsistent with prior research and indicates a characteristic that should be further investigated in relation to stigma reduction. Furthermore, the degree of attention paid to the modules affected attitude change positively - another area in need of further research to determine the stability of this finding.
Comparing this study with prior research showed how different intervention content and presentation styles differently affect attitude change. These comparisons present important considerations for future studies that use anti-stigma interventions, to ensure these are being designed in the most effective ways. Finally, the public response to this study suggests a disconnect between academic and layperson’s understandings of “stigma reduction”. This indicates the need for transparency and clarity in communicating this and similar research, as well as a wider addressing of the stigma surrounding child sexual abuse, to effectively prevent this abuse.
[updated 14 November 2025]
What do people with divers cultural backgrounds think about EEG research?
We investigated perceptions of Electroencephalography (EEG) and neurofeedback methods and asked what researchers could do to make such research more accessible in a culturally diverse group from Aotearoa New Zealand. Content analyses of open-text answers from an online survey with 181 participants showed that most participants were not sure what EEG was or about its function. Participants also had several suggestions to improve accessibility. Our summary recommendations for future EEG based research are:
1) Mention the option to work with a female researcher in the advertisment;
2) Give as much information about the procedure in the recuitment materials, e.g. include a video that shows the procedure;
3) Provide a comfortable and inviting space;
4) Explain the procedure step-by-step at the start and throughout the study;
5) Provide the oppoortunity for participants to give feedback.
If you would like to use our info video, please get in touch: [email protected]
[updated 30 May 2025]
The effects of neurofeedback training on emotional arousal in individuals varying on psychopathy
People with high levels of psychopathic traits have consistently found to have lower emotional responses, which is thought to enable the patterns of antisocial behaviour they often show. With this study, we aimed to investigate the potential of neurofeedback training as a way for people to learn to upregulate their emotional arousal. In a neurofeedback training session, the learner wears an EEG cap that measures their brain activity. Visual feedback is generated from the EEG signals to represent their level of emotional arousal, and this feedback is displayed to the learner in real time so they can attempt to increase it. To detect arousal in brain activity, we measured the top features of the Emotional Arousal Pattern (EMAP; Eisenbarth et al.; under review; see also Shehu et al., 2023). Participants completed two neurofeedback sessions, each consisting of two 10-minute training blocks. To investigate the effectiveness of the neurofeedback training, we measured self-reported emotional arousal and emotional distraction (using the Emotion Induced Blindness task) before and after training. Psychopathy was also measured with the Psychopathic Personality Inventory–Revised–40 (PPI–R–40) self-report questionnaire. There was no significant increase in emotional arousal following neurofeedback training, regardless of psychopathy level. We therefore concluded that our neurofeedback training programme was not enough to affect arousal, largely because of methodological limitations such as the small number of training sessions. From conducting this study, we have developed several recommendations to improve future neurofeedback training, and we judge that with the necessary changes, neurofeedback training remains a potentially effective intervention for emotional responding with high levels of psychopathic traits.
This study was conducted by Emma Buurmans.
[updated 10 July 2023]
A Comparison of Humans and Machine Learning Classifiers Categorizing Emotion from Faces with Different Coverings
This research compared the ability of humans and artificial emotion classification systems in categorizing emotion from faces of people with sunglasses and different face masks. We presented images of emotional facial expressions and added three different coverings—sunglasses, the full covering masks used by front-line workers, and a newly transparent mask with a transparent mouth window (see Fig. 1). We found that artificial emotion classification systems perform better than humans when sunglasses (> 7% difference) or no covering (> 15% difference) were used. However, the performance of artificial emotion classification systems suffered a significantly larger decrease in comparison to humans with masks (> 30%) added to the face. Therefore, these artificial emotion classification systems are anticipated to perform badly in understanding peoples’ emotion from their face, particularly given the added challenge brought on by the face masks. This study was conducted by Harisu Abdullahi Shehu You can find the related publication here.
Fig 1. Sample unmasked, masked, transparent mask, and sunglasses images presented to humans and artificial emotion classification systems.
[updated 16 November 2022]
Does sexual arousal predict riskier sexual decision-making?
A study by Ariel and Lowenstein (2006) first investigated this relationship and found that sexual arousal significantly increased sexually risky and aggressive behaviour. The primary aim of our study was to replicate the findings of Ariel and Lowenstein (2006) using both male and female participants (N = 91). Our study also investigated the role of trait impulsivity and sexual decision-making, as well as examining the physiological and self-report concordance of arousal. Sexually explicit video clips as well as hypothetical romantic scenarios were used to evaluate the effects of sexual arousal on sexual risk-taking intentions. Additional anger, amusement and neutral conditions were used as comparison conditions. The findings from this study suggests that sexual arousal impacted sexual decision-making but to a lesser degree than what was found in Ariely & Loewenstein (2006). Impulsivity was also shown to be a significant factor within this relationship as individuals higher in trait impulsivity, self-reported riskier sexual decisions. Physiological and self-report measures showed no concurrency. Taken together, these findings suggest that in scenarios where both men and women are sexually aroused, they may lower their inhibition and experience impaired decision-making. This effect becomes further compounded if individuals are also high in trait impulsivity. This interaction may have a negative impact during sexual encounters and be a key contributor to the STI and sexual violence pandemic.
This study was conducted by Joseph Savio and is in the process of writing up for publication.
[updated 21 November 2022]
The sense of agency changes in motivational states dependent on personality traits
We all have experienced the heat of the moment and maybe feeling as though we lost the control over what we did or didn’t even consider the consequences at that moment. We investigated how our feeling of control, our sense of agency, is affected by our motivations, especially sexual arousal and pleasure and examined the effects of these states dependent on personality traits such as psychopathy and high anxiety. Participants watched short videos showing a pornographic or romantic scene while being in an eye tracker and we observed their heart rate and skin conductance as measures of their motivational response. Our results showed that the feeling of control over actions in sexual arousal was still intact in individuals with higher psychopathic traits, however, the link of awareness of consequences following these actions vanished completely. Individuals with high anxiety mirrored this pattern in the opposite direction, the link between actions and consequences was strengthened but the feeling of control over actions was reduced in sexual arousal and pleasure. Our findings highlight that the feeling of control and the awareness of consequences are two different processes that can diverge within one individual highly motivational states.
This study was done by Anna Render and the results are currently in the publication process.
[updated 21/12/2020]
We investigated perceptions of Electroencephalography (EEG) and neurofeedback methods and asked what researchers could do to make such research more accessible in a culturally diverse group from Aotearoa New Zealand. Content analyses of open-text answers from an online survey with 181 participants showed that most participants were not sure what EEG was or about its function. Participants also had several suggestions to improve accessibility. Our summary recommendations for future EEG based research are:
1) Mention the option to work with a female researcher in the advertisment;
2) Give as much information about the procedure in the recuitment materials, e.g. include a video that shows the procedure;
3) Provide a comfortable and inviting space;
4) Explain the procedure step-by-step at the start and throughout the study;
5) Provide the oppoortunity for participants to give feedback.
If you would like to use our info video, please get in touch: [email protected]
[updated 30 May 2025]
The effects of neurofeedback training on emotional arousal in individuals varying on psychopathy
People with high levels of psychopathic traits have consistently found to have lower emotional responses, which is thought to enable the patterns of antisocial behaviour they often show. With this study, we aimed to investigate the potential of neurofeedback training as a way for people to learn to upregulate their emotional arousal. In a neurofeedback training session, the learner wears an EEG cap that measures their brain activity. Visual feedback is generated from the EEG signals to represent their level of emotional arousal, and this feedback is displayed to the learner in real time so they can attempt to increase it. To detect arousal in brain activity, we measured the top features of the Emotional Arousal Pattern (EMAP; Eisenbarth et al.; under review; see also Shehu et al., 2023). Participants completed two neurofeedback sessions, each consisting of two 10-minute training blocks. To investigate the effectiveness of the neurofeedback training, we measured self-reported emotional arousal and emotional distraction (using the Emotion Induced Blindness task) before and after training. Psychopathy was also measured with the Psychopathic Personality Inventory–Revised–40 (PPI–R–40) self-report questionnaire. There was no significant increase in emotional arousal following neurofeedback training, regardless of psychopathy level. We therefore concluded that our neurofeedback training programme was not enough to affect arousal, largely because of methodological limitations such as the small number of training sessions. From conducting this study, we have developed several recommendations to improve future neurofeedback training, and we judge that with the necessary changes, neurofeedback training remains a potentially effective intervention for emotional responding with high levels of psychopathic traits.
This study was conducted by Emma Buurmans.
[updated 10 July 2023]
A Comparison of Humans and Machine Learning Classifiers Categorizing Emotion from Faces with Different Coverings
This research compared the ability of humans and artificial emotion classification systems in categorizing emotion from faces of people with sunglasses and different face masks. We presented images of emotional facial expressions and added three different coverings—sunglasses, the full covering masks used by front-line workers, and a newly transparent mask with a transparent mouth window (see Fig. 1). We found that artificial emotion classification systems perform better than humans when sunglasses (> 7% difference) or no covering (> 15% difference) were used. However, the performance of artificial emotion classification systems suffered a significantly larger decrease in comparison to humans with masks (> 30%) added to the face. Therefore, these artificial emotion classification systems are anticipated to perform badly in understanding peoples’ emotion from their face, particularly given the added challenge brought on by the face masks. This study was conducted by Harisu Abdullahi Shehu You can find the related publication here.
Fig 1. Sample unmasked, masked, transparent mask, and sunglasses images presented to humans and artificial emotion classification systems.
[updated 16 November 2022]
Does sexual arousal predict riskier sexual decision-making?
A study by Ariel and Lowenstein (2006) first investigated this relationship and found that sexual arousal significantly increased sexually risky and aggressive behaviour. The primary aim of our study was to replicate the findings of Ariel and Lowenstein (2006) using both male and female participants (N = 91). Our study also investigated the role of trait impulsivity and sexual decision-making, as well as examining the physiological and self-report concordance of arousal. Sexually explicit video clips as well as hypothetical romantic scenarios were used to evaluate the effects of sexual arousal on sexual risk-taking intentions. Additional anger, amusement and neutral conditions were used as comparison conditions. The findings from this study suggests that sexual arousal impacted sexual decision-making but to a lesser degree than what was found in Ariely & Loewenstein (2006). Impulsivity was also shown to be a significant factor within this relationship as individuals higher in trait impulsivity, self-reported riskier sexual decisions. Physiological and self-report measures showed no concurrency. Taken together, these findings suggest that in scenarios where both men and women are sexually aroused, they may lower their inhibition and experience impaired decision-making. This effect becomes further compounded if individuals are also high in trait impulsivity. This interaction may have a negative impact during sexual encounters and be a key contributor to the STI and sexual violence pandemic.
This study was conducted by Joseph Savio and is in the process of writing up for publication.
[updated 21 November 2022]
The sense of agency changes in motivational states dependent on personality traits
We all have experienced the heat of the moment and maybe feeling as though we lost the control over what we did or didn’t even consider the consequences at that moment. We investigated how our feeling of control, our sense of agency, is affected by our motivations, especially sexual arousal and pleasure and examined the effects of these states dependent on personality traits such as psychopathy and high anxiety. Participants watched short videos showing a pornographic or romantic scene while being in an eye tracker and we observed their heart rate and skin conductance as measures of their motivational response. Our results showed that the feeling of control over actions in sexual arousal was still intact in individuals with higher psychopathic traits, however, the link of awareness of consequences following these actions vanished completely. Individuals with high anxiety mirrored this pattern in the opposite direction, the link between actions and consequences was strengthened but the feeling of control over actions was reduced in sexual arousal and pleasure. Our findings highlight that the feeling of control and the awareness of consequences are two different processes that can diverge within one individual highly motivational states.
This study was done by Anna Render and the results are currently in the publication process.
[updated 21/12/2020]
