Les liens entre l’impulsivité et la coercition sexuelle : les apports d’un modèle multidimensionnel et de tâches comportementales

Studies conducted with college students and men convicted of sexual crimes suggest that impulsivity may be a factor associated with the perpetration of sexual coercion, defined as the use of any strategy to engage in sexual contact with a non-consenting person. Through one theoretical and two empirical articles, this dissertation tested the links between sexual coercion and impulsivity in a sample of university students. The first article offers a review of the literature on the associations between impulsivity and three problematic sexual behaviors: risky sexual behaviors, marital infidelity and the perpetration of sexual coercion. The article elaborates the hypothesis of domain-specific impulsivity, meaning that impulsivity may vary from one domain to another and that individuals with impulse control difficulties particularly in the sexual domain are more likely to engage in problematic sexual behaviors. Sexual adaptations of two behavioral impulsivity tasks - the delay discounting task and the stop-signal task - are presented as relevant methodologies for testing the hypothesis of a domain-specific impulsivity. One hundred and one male and heterosexual university students were recruited to participate in a quasi-experimental study. They first completed online questionnaires measuring sexual coercion perpetration and impulsivity using a multidimensional model (UPPS-P). Participants then completed an experimental session that included a money discounting task, a sexual discounting task, and a stop-signal task involving neutral, erotic and non-erotic emotional conditions. The second article presents the results pertaining to the impulsivity questionnaire and the results of the delay discounting tasks. Past perpetration of sexual coercion is associated with a tendency to act impulsively in the presence of negative emotions, a more impulsive sexual decision-making, and a less impulsive monetary decision-making. These results suggest that the decision-making process of students who report having engaged in sexual coercion is more oriented toward immediate gratification in sexual contexts than in non-sexual contexts. The results pertaining to the stop-signal task, presented in article 3, indicate that sexual coercion perpetrators present poorer response inhibition performances than non-perpetrators, regardless of the nature of the stimuli. Thus, sexual coercion would be more associated with a global difficulty in stopping a behavior once it is initiated rather than a specific inhibition difficulty when exposed to erotic cues. In general, this dissertation paints a complex picture of the links between sexual coercion and impulsivity, highlighting the relevance of using multiple impulsivity measures to capture intra-individual variations. It appears that the decision-making process is more susceptible to a domain-specific effect than inhibitory skills. These findings suggest that sexual coercion is associated with a combination of non-sexual (i.e., lack of motor inhibition and emotional reactivity) and sexuality related characteristics (i.e., impulsive sexual decision-making). Further studies appear necessary to determine whether impulsivity plays a causal role in sexual coercion and to investigate its interactions with cultural, interpersonal, and situational factors that exacerbate and mitigate the risk of sexual coercion.

Keyphrases: UPPS-P, Sexual coercion, Impulsivity, Response inhibition, Delay discounting, Stop-signal task, Domain-specificity, Clinical psychology