Brain activation patterns associated with sexual orientation in homosexual male and female: a case study with 3.0T fMRI
نویسندگان
چکیده
This study was performed to clarify the sexual orientation in a 19-year-old homosexual male and a 20-year-old homosexual female by using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with viewing male and female erotic nude pictures. The sex hormone levels of the homosexual male and female were in the normal range of healthy heterosexual males and females, respectively. In both homosexuals more significant brain activities were observed while viewing the nude pictures of the same genetic sex than those of the opposite sex in the frontal cortex, parietal cortex, occipital cortex, anterior cingulate gyrus, amygdala, midbrain, hippocampus, orbitofrontal cortex, parahippocampal gyrus, thalamus, globus pallidus, and putamen, which are known to be responsive to sexual arousal. The homosexual male and female showed a tendency toward higher sexual arousal to the same genetic sex as comparison with the opposite sex. This finding may be useful to understand the different neural mechanisms on sexual arousal in homosexuals.
منابع مشابه
Ventrolateral Preoptic Nucleus of Hypothalamus; A Possible Target for Deep Brain Stimulation for Treatment of Sexual Dysfunction
Sexual function and orientation is a complex platform of human personality which is being modulated by several brain circuities which is less understood currently. Recently, several studies have demonstrated interesting results regarding the role of several brain locations in sexual behaviors and orientation. Sexual arousal in homosexual men are associated with activation of the left angular gy...
متن کاملPatterns of brain activation during visually evoked sexual arousal differ between homosexual and heterosexual men.
BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Nowadays the mechanism of homosexuality is little known. Few studies have been carried out to explore the brain functional changes of homosexual men during sexual arousal. We used functional MR imaging (fMRI) to determine whether the patterns of brain activation in homosexual and heterosexual men differed during visually evoked sexual arousal. MATERIALS AND METHODS To a...
متن کاملFace Perception Is Modulated by Sexual Preference
Face perception is mediated by a distributed neural system in the human brain . The response to faces is modulated by cognitive factors such as attention, visual imagery, and emotion ; however, the effects of gender and sexual orientation are currently unknown. We used fMRI to test whether subjects would respond more to their sexually preferred faces and predicted such modulation in the reward ...
متن کاملNeural Correlates of Sexual Orientation in Heterosexual, Bisexual, and Homosexual Men
Studies of subjective and genital sexual arousal in monosexual (i.e. heterosexual and homosexual) men have repeatedly found that erotic stimuli depicting men's preferred sex produce strong responses, whereas erotic stimuli depicting the other sex produce much weaker responses. Inconsistent results have previously been obtained in bisexual men, who have sometimes demonstrated distinctly bisexual...
متن کاملSexual orientation, theory of mind and empathy: a comparison of male homosexual and male and female heterosexuals
Background: Researchers have been investigating similarities of and differences between homosexuals and heterosexuals for past few decades. Several studies have shown that in the particular domain (e.g., spatial ability), male homosexuals would resemble female heterosexuals better than male heterosexuals. Executive function, however, has received more attention than social cognition in this lin...
متن کامل