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I'll speak about a study of Balanchard, "Sexual Attraction to Others: A Comparison of Two Models of Alloerotic Responding in Men" (2010).

The paper can be downloaded here: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10508-...

The goal of this study was to investigate the typical pattern of sexual orientation in humans.
Infact, the study has been presented with the title "What is sexual orientation?".

The questions were:
1) What drives a person towards an attraction to a category of persons (men, women, boys, girls)?
2) In which way are different sexual preferences related with each other? If, for example, a man is primarily attracted to women, what will be more likely his secondary attraction?

If you test a male with Penile plethysmography (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penile_plethysmograph), and you show him erotic pictures with different subjects (men, women, boys, girls), you can draw a function of his sexual arousal (according to penis volume). The highest point of the function identifies the primary sexual orientation of the subject.

Balanchard wanted to build a mathematical model which could predict the function of sexual arousal of a male with the different categories of persons, given as input his primary sexual orientation.

The first hypothesis was that attraction in humans could be generalized as an attraction towards to one gender or an other, which is what most people believe.
The model based on this first hypothesis was not able to correctly predict the function, so it was wrong.

The second hypothesis was that attraction in humans could be generalized as an attraction towards a combination between gender and age.
This second hypothesis was better than the first, but still not so good.

The third hypthesis was that attraction in humans could be generalized as an attraction towards a human morphology (a set of physical qualities).
This hypothesis produced the best results.
An important concept of this third model, is the [b]morphological distance[/b].
Morphological distance is a mesure which says how much two catagories of persons are different in relation of physical qualities/morfology.
Higher the distance, higher the difference.
Here below the table of morphological distances



Balanchard found out that, thanks to morphological distance, he was able to calculate the probability that a person with a determined sexual orientation was attracted to a person outside the prefered category.
Lower the morphological distance between the prefered category and the non prefered category, higher the probabily of a sexual attraction towards a subject of the non prefered category.

For example, the morphological distance between prepubescent boys and prepubescent girls is considered to be 1, while the morfological distance between prepubescent boys and an adult males is considered to be 2.
Therefore, the probability that an homosexual pedophile has an attraction towards a prepubescent girl is higher in respect of an attraction towards an adult male.

In the image below you can see the results of the Penile plethysmography test that Balanchard used to verify each hypothesys. The sample: 2278 males.



As you can see, in teleiophiles (people attracted to adults) the secondary attraction is towards children of the prefered gender.
The reason is easy to understand.
Take for example the morfological distance between adult females and other cathegories of persons.

Women - Pubescent girls : 1
Women - Prepubescent girls : 2
Women - Prepubescent boys : 3
Women - Pubescent boys : 4
Women - Men : 5

As you can see, the morphological distance between adult females and other age groups of females is lower in respect to every morphological distance between an age group of males and adult females.

For that reason, teleiophiles tend to feel their sexual orientation as an attraction towards a gender.

What they don't understand, is that in reality their attraction is not towards a gender, but towards a human morfology.


The same thing is infact not true when it comes to pedophiles.
Consider the morphological distance between prepubescent boys and other cathegories.

Women - Prepubescent boys: 3
Pubescent females - Prepubescent boys: 2
Prepubescent females - Prepubescent boys: 1
Pubescent males - Prepubescent boys: 1
Adult males - Prepubescent boys: 2

As you can see, the sexual arousal of homosexual pedophiles towards prepubescent girls is higher than sexual arousal towards adult males.
The reason is, an other time, easy to understand: the morphological distance between prepubescent boys and prepubescent girls is lower.

Many pedophiles think that pedophilia is a sexual orientation, but they have an hard time to explain it to teleiophiles, because teleiophiles are not able to feel the position of pedophiles in the scale of morphological distance.
Teleiophiles think that sexual orientation is based on a gender preference because is what you feel when you are at the extreme left or extreme right of the scale of morphological distance.

An interesting observation: if, in the image above, you move your eyes in this direction: Heterosexual teleiophiles - Heterosexual hebephiles - Heterosexual pedophiles - Homosexual pedophiles - Homosexual hebephiles - Homosexual teleiophiles (it is a counterclockwise rotation) you can perceive like everything moves from left to right.
Do you see?
It is the movement inside the scale of morphological distance.

It is a scale where heterosexual teleiophiles are at the extreme left, homosexual teleiophiles at the extreme right, and pedophiles in the middle.

To conclude the PART 2, the model of Balanchard is obviously not perfect, but the general idea works well. At least, we know that sexual orientation is not an attraction towards a gender, but towards a set of physical qualities.