This paper presents two studies pertaining to the use of virtual characters applied in clinical forensic rehabilitation of sex offenders. The first study is about the validation of the perceived age of virtual characters designed to simulate primary and secondary sexual character of typical adult and child individuals. The second study puts to use these virtual characters in comparing a group o...

Sexual behavior is directed by a sophisticated interplay between steroid hormone actions in the brain that give rise to sexual arousability and experience with sexual reward that gives rise to expectations of competent sexual activity, sexual desire, arousal, and performance. Sexual experience allows animals to form instrumental associations between internal or external stimuli and behaviors th...

The evolution of mating signals and preferences assists speciation by facilitating assortative mating within diverging lineages, thereby closing down conduits of gene flow between lineages. However, sexual communication traits are frequently subject to stabilizing selection, suggesting that new variants will be selected against, thereby discouraging their divergent evolution. Pleiotropic mutati...

Indirect measures of cognition have become an important tool in research on sexual offending. Such methods allow the exploration and testing of models of cognitive processes that might underpin sexual preferences and, in turn, sexual offending. The article reviews studies that have used a large range of indirect techniques (e.g., Implicit Association Test, Implicit Relational Assessment Procedu...

The role of experience in shaping individual female mating preferences has been relatively neglected. The goal of this study was to examine how female mating preferences are shaped through male–female interactions in the clonally reproducing female gynogenetic fish, Poecilia formosa. In visual choice tests, some P. formosa preferred P. latipinna males and others preferred males of another poeci...

An increasing number of studies find females to base their mate choice on several cues. Why this occurs is debated and many different hypotheses have been proposed. Here I review the hypotheses and the evidence in favour of them. At the same time I provide a new categorisation based on the adaptiveness of the preferences and the information content of the cues. A few comparative and empirical s...