SynthesisProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2019
Neural substrates of sexual arousal are not sex dependent.
Synthesis in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed, 44 citations in OpenAlex.
- Effects of Kisspeptin on Sexual Brain Processing and Penile Tumescence in Men With Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder: A Randomized Clinical Trial.JAMA network open · 2023Trial
- Persistent appetitive memory in problematic pornography users.Journal of behavioral addictions · 2026Article
- Diminished general and sexual hedonic capacity in schizophrenia - a clinical and neural characterization.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2026Article
- Neuroaffective Processing of Sexually Relevant Images in Hetero- and Homosexual Women and Men: Subjective, Pupillometric, and Magnetoencephalographic Correlates.Psychophysiology · 2025Article
- The Neuroendocrine Regulation of Reproductive Behavior and Emotional Control by Kisspeptin.The Journal of clinical endocrinology and metabolism · 2025Review
- An Honest Reckoning With the Amygdala and Mental Illness.The American journal of psychiatry · 2024Review
- Appetitive conditioning with pornographic stimuli elicits stronger activation in reward regions than monetary and gaming-related stimuli.Human brain mapping · 2024Article
- Gender Dysphoria and Sexual Euphoria: A Bayesian Perspective on the Influence of Gender-Affirming Hormone Therapy on Sexual Arousal.Archives of sexual behavior · 2024Article
- Pattern recognition reveals sex-dependent neural substrates of sexual perception.Human brain mapping · 2023Article
- Androstadienone sensitivity is associated with attention to emotions, social interactions, and sexual behavior in older U.S. adults.PloS one · 2023Article
- Erotic cue exposure increases neural reward responses without modulating temporal discounting.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2023Article
- The Brain Activation-Based Sexual Image Classifier (BASIC): A Sensitive and Specific fMRI Activity Pattern for Sexual Image Processing.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2022Article
- Potential biomarkers for distinguishing primary from acquired premature ejaculation: A diffusion tensor imaging based network study.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2022Article
- In Pursuit of Pleasure: A Biopsychosocial Perspective on Sexual Pleasure and Gender.International journal of sexual health : official journal of the World Association for Sexual Health · 2021Article
- Neural substrates of sexual arousal revisited: Dependent on sex.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Reply to Poeppl et al.: Controlling for false positive rates is critical for accurate and consistent interpretation of findings.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Women at Greater Sexual Risk for STIs/HIV Have a Lower Mesolimbic and Affective Bias Response to Sexual Stimuli.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2019Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 1 institution in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Sexual arousal is a dynamical, highly coordinated neurophysiological process that is often induced by visual stimuli. Numerous studies have proposed that the cognitive processing stage of responding to sexual stimuli is the first stage, in which sex differences occur, and the divergence between men and women has been attributed to differences in the concerted activity of neural networks. The present comprehensive metaanalysis challenges this hypothesis and provides robust quantitative evidence that the neuronal circuitries activated by visual sexual stimuli are independent of biological sex. Sixty-one functional magnetic resonance imaging studies (1,850 individuals) that presented erotic visual stimuli to men and women of different sexual orientation were identified. Coordinate-based activation likelihood estimation was used to conduct metaanalyses. Sensitivity and clustering analyses of averaged neuronal response patterns were performed to investigate robustness of the findings. In contrast to neutral stimuli, sexual pictures and videos induce significant activations in brain regions, including insula, middle occipital, anterior cingulate and fusiform gyrus, amygdala, striatum, pulvinar, and substantia nigra. Cluster analysis suggests stimulus type as the most, and biological sex as the least, predictor for classification. Contrast analysis further shows no significant sex-specific differences within groups. Systematic review of sex differences in gray matter volume of brain regions associated with sexual arousal (3,723 adults) did not show any causal relationship between structural features and functional response to visual sexual stimuli. The neural basis of sexual arousal in humans is associated with sexual orientation yet, contrary to the widely accepted view, is not different between women and men.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.