Activation of mirror-neuron system by erotic video clips predicts degree of induced erection: an fMRI study

Reward sensitivity is associated with brain activity during erotic stimulus processing

“…The insula has been associated with several brain functions such as the processing of interoceptive information, emotional awareness, perception of body movement, and cognitive control [63]. Previous fMRI studies on erotic stimulation showed that insula activity increases during the presentation of erotic stimuli [20,49,50,51,61,32] under penis stimulation [64] and correlates with penis turgidity [20,32,65,66]. These findings suggest the implication of the insula in monitoring interoceptive responses and are consistent with the proposed role of the insula in conscious feeling.…”

Unification Strategies in Cognitive Science

“…This neural system responsible for action observation/execution matching was called the mirror neuron system (MNS). The MNS was hypothesized to be involved in quite diverse cognitive functions, including empathy (Gallese 2003), action understanding (Kohler et al, 2002), intention understanding, linguistic communication (Arbib 2005;Arbib 2012), and even sexual preferences (Ponseti et al, 2006;Mouras et al, 2008). However, as it turns out, some such hypotheses are based on spurious correlations, and top-down interventions are ignored in this research.…”

Neuroimaging and Sexual Behavior: Identification of Regional and Functional Differences

“…The ACC shows at least two distinct regions of activation, each with associated features in behavioral response or cognitive processing. In response to sexual stimuli, caudal ACC activation is associated with initiation and motivation of behavior toward a directed goal [9,15,20,26,39].…”