ArticleSocial cognitive and affective neuroscience2020
Sex differences in the human reward system: convergent behavioral, autonomic and neural evidence.
Article in Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 25 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
25 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 48 citations in OpenAlex.
- Sex-biased transcriptomic landscapes in bipolar disorder: integrating neurobiology and clinical heterogeneity through cross-study meta-analysis.Biology of sex differences · 2026Pooled it
- Brain-wide activity mapping reveals the somatosensory cortex as a sex-specific regulator of hedonic feeding.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2026Article
- Characterisation of a touchscreen-based task for assessing cognitive judgement bias in mice: a new translational tool for affective state disorder drug screening.Psychopharmacology · 2026Article
- Gender-based differences in colorectal cancer screening uptake in Singapore: a cross-sectional study.Family practice · 2026Article
- Sex-specific neural responses to smartphone cues in young adults.Biology of sex differences · 2026Article
- Sex dependency of subconscious visual perception.Biology of sex differences · 2025Article
- Testing a Reward-Processing Model of Negative Urgency in Women With and Without Binge Eating.Clinical psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2025Article
- Distinct neural computations scale the violation of expected reward and emotion in social transgressions.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Associations Between the Neural Stress Response and Symptoms of Anxiety and Depression.Journal of neuroscience research · 2025Article
- Sex differences in motivational biases over instrumental actions.NPJ science of learning · 2024Article
- Reward processes in extinction learning and applications to exposure therapy.Journal of anxiety disorders · 2024Review
- Diffusion Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Human Reward System Research: A Bibliometric Analysis and Visualisation of Current Research Trends.The Malaysian journal of medical sciences : MJMS · 2024Article
- Effects of GABA, Sex, and Stress on Reward Learning in Current and Remitted Major Depression.Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging · 2024Article
- Sex differences in the rapid detection of neutral faces associated with emotional value.Biology of sex differences · 2023Article
- Sexual health and serotonin 4 receptor brain binding in unmedicated patients with depression-a NeuroPharm study.Translational psychiatry · 2023Article
- Sex differences in externalizing and internalizing traits and ventral striatal responses to monetary loss.Journal of psychiatric research · 2023Article
- Potential Biological Markers and Treatment Implications for Binge Eating Disorder and Behavioral Addictions.Nutrients · 2023Review
- Dynamic processing of hunger and thirst by common mesolimbic neural ensembles.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Reward sensitivity modulates the brain reward pathway in stress resilience via the inherent neuroendocrine system.Neurobiology of stress · 2022Article
- Functional activation of insula and dorsal anterior cingulate for conflict control against larger monetary loss in young adults with subthreshold depression: a preliminary study.Scientific reports · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
6 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Several studies have suggested that females and males differ in reward behaviors and their underlying neural circuitry. Whether human sex differences extend across neural and behavioral levels for both rewards and punishments remains unclear. We studied a community sample of 221 young women and men who performed a monetary incentive task known to engage the mesoaccumbal pathway and salience network. Both stimulus salience (behavioral relevance) and valence (win vs loss) varied during the task. In response to high- vs low-salience stimuli presented during the monetary incentive task, men showed greater subjective arousal ratings, behavioral accuracy and skin conductance responses (P < 0.006, Hedges' effect size g = 0.38 to 0.46). In a subsample studied with functional magnetic resonance imaging (n = 44), men exhibited greater responsiveness to stimulus salience in the nucleus accumbens, midbrain, anterior insula and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (P < 0.02, g = 0.86 to 1.7). Behavioral, autonomic and neural sensitivity to the valence of stimuli did not differ by sex, indicating that responses to rewards vs punishments were similar in women and men. These results reveal novel and robust sex differences in reward- and punishment-related traits, behavior, autonomic activity and neural responses. These convergent results suggest a neurobehavioral basis for sexual dimorphism observed in the reward system, including reward-related disorders.
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Registered trials
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.