New Research: Ever wonder if people have certain sexual interests and never act on them or even participate in certain sexual activities even when they aren’t interested in them? Dr. Dawson and her colleagues at the Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre and Queen’s University recently published a study to answer this question.

Seto, M. C., Curry, S., Dawson, S. J., Bradford, J., & Chivers, M. L. (in press). Concordance of Paraphilic Interests and Behaviors. Journal of Sex Research.

In this study, we sampled 1036 men and women and asked them about their sexual interest in 13 different paraphilias (e.g., sadism, masochism, pedophilia), as well as whether or not they had engaged in these behaviours. Paraphilic interests were significantly and positively correlated with behaviors across all 13 themes (i.e., showed evidence of concordance). The associations were strongest for masochism and sadism, and weakest for pedohebephilia and frotteurism. Sex drive moderated some of these positive associations for the various paraphilic themes, such that higher concordance between interests and behaviors were present at higher levels of sex drive.