Introduction Sexual arousal is a complex series of psycho-neuro-vascular events. There have been few clinical studies on the central control of male sexual arousal. Recently, a preliminary study was performed to identify brain areas activated in healthy males with visual sexual stimulation using PET. However, there is no clinical report to use fMRI in evaluating the brain region associated with...

Previous studies have demonstrated variable influences of sexual hormonal states on female brain activation and the necessity to control for these in neuroimaging studies. However, systematic investigations of these influences, particularly those of hormonal contraceptives as compared to the physiological menstrual cycle are scarce. In the present study, we investigated the hormonal modulation ...

Considerable evidence has accumulated from studies in vivo and with tissue slices indicating that erotic acid (4-carboxyuracil), or a closely related compound, is a precursor of the pyrimidines in nucleic acid (l-6). In order to study the pathway of erotic acid metabolism at the enzymatic level, a source material capable of metabolizing large amounts of erotic acid was sought. Such a system was...

Recent event-related potential studies observed an early posterior negativity (EPN) reflecting facilitated processing of emotional images. The present study explored if the facilitated processing of emotional pictures is sustained while subjects perform an explicit non-emotional attention task. EEG was recorded from 129 channels while subjects viewed a rapid continuous stream of images containi...

A definite connection of erotic acid with the biosynthesis of nucleic acid pyrimidines is provided by the finding that erotic acid (7) as well as thymine (8,9) can supplement or replace the folic acid required by certain microorganisms. As suggested by Chattaway (7)) it would appear that folic acid has a function in the biosynthesis of pyrimidines. Furthermore, this function is probably concern...

Although the combination of alcohol and sex is frequently observed in human social interaction, many questions concerning alcohol’s effects on the processing of sexual stimuli and brain functionality remain unanswered. Erotic films eliciting sexual arousal in humans and affect electroencephalographic (EEG) activity. This study examines the effects of alcohol on cortical EEG activity in young me...

Based on studies of heterosexual male fetishists, transvestites, and transsexuals, Blanchard (1991) proposed the existence of a hitherto unrecognized paraphilic dimension, erotic target location errors (ETLEs), involving the erroneous location of erotic targets in the environment. ETLEs can involve preferential attention to a peripheral or inessential part of an erotic target, manifesting as fe...

Exotic Becomes Erotic: Explaining the Enigma of Sexual Orientation Daryl J. Bem Cornell University In this address, I outline my “Exotic-Becomes-Erotic" theory of sexual orientation (Bem, 1996) , which provides the same basic account for both opposite-sex and same-sex erotic desire—and for both men and women. It proposes that biological variables do not code for sexual orientation per se but fo...

BACKGROUND Although pedophilia is of high public concern, little is known about underlying neural mechanisms. Although pedophilic patients are sexually attracted to prepubescent children, they show no sexual interest toward adults. This study aimed to investigate the neural correlates of deficits of sexual and emotional arousal in pedophiles. METHODS Thirteen pedophilic patients and 14 health...