Mental Health
The effects of exposure to virtual child pornography on viewer cognitions and attitudes toward deviant sexual behavior.
Open Access: No.
Abstract
Assumptions regarding the harmful effects of exposure to virtual child pornography are tested in a laboratory experiment. Based on a lexical decision-making task, participants exposed to sexually explicit depictions of females who appear to be minors (“barely legal” pornography) were faster to recognize sexual words after being primed with neutral depictions of girls compared to participants who were preexposed to adult pornography. Trend analysis showed that participants took longer to recognize sexual words after exposure to neutral depictions of underage females the older the models they saw in the exposure condition. Contrary to predictions, male and female participants exposed to barely legal pornography estimated lower rather than higher prevalence and popularity of barely legal depictions than those in other conditions. Implications of evidence of a child-sex cognitive schema following exposure to barely legal pornography and explanations for the failure to support predictions concerning Web-based barely legal pornography are discussed.
Relevance
“Findings from this study indicate that exposure to virtual child pornography, in the form of barely legal sexually explicit depictions, did result in a cognitive effect. Exposure to sexually explicit depictions featuring underage-looking models results in viewers being more likely to associate sex and sexuality to subsequent nonsexual depictions of minors.”
Citation
Paul, B., & Linz, D. G. (2008). The effects of exposure to virtual child pornography on viewer cognitions and attitudes toward deviant sexual behavior. Communication Research, 35(1), 3–38. https://doi.org/10.1177/0093650207309359
