Areas of brain activation in males and females during viewing of erotic film excerpts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Various lines of evidence indicate that men generally experience greater sexual arousal (SA) to erotic stimuli than women. Yet, little is known regarding the neurobiological processes underlying such a gender difference. To investigate this issue, functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to compare the neural correlates of SA in 20 male and 20 female subjects. Brain activity was measured while male and female subjects were viewing erotic film excerpts. Results showed that the level of perceived SA was significantly higher in male than in female subjects. When compared to viewing emotionally neutral film excerpts, viewing erotic film excerpts was associated, for both genders, with bilateral blood oxygen level dependant (BOLD) signal increases in the anterior cingulate, medial prefrontal, orbitofrontal, insular, and occipitotemporal cortices, as well as in the amygdala and the ventral striatum. Only for the group of male subjects was there evidence of a significant activation of the thalamus and hypothalamus, a sexually dimorphic area of the brain known to play a pivotal role in physiological arousal and sexual behavior. When directly compared between genders, hypothalamic activation was found to be significantly greater in male subjects. Furthermore, for male subjects only, the magnitude of hypothalamic activation was positively correlated with reported levels of SA. These findings reveal the existence of similarities and dissimilarities in the way the brain of both genders responds to erotic stimuli. They further suggest that the greater SA generally experienced by men, when viewing erotica, may be related to the functional gender difference found here with respect to the hypothalamus. Hum. Brain Mapping 16:1–13, 2002. © 2002 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".