Neural Correlates of Sexual Orientation in Heterosexual, Bisexual, and Homosexual Women

Abstract

We used fMRI to investigate neural correlates of responses to erotic pictures and videos in heterosexual (N = 26), bisexual (N = 26), and homosexual (N = 24) women, ages 25–50. We focused on the ventral striatum, an area of the brain associated with desire, extending previous findings from the sexual psychophysiology literature in which homosexual women had greater category specificity (relative to heterosexual and bisexual women) in their responses to male and female erotic stimuli. We found that homosexual women’s subjective and neural responses reflected greater bias towards female stimuli, compared with bisexual and heterosexual women, whose responses did not significantly differ. These patterns were also suggested by whole brain analyses, with homosexual women showing category-specific activations of greater extents in visual and auditory processing areas. Bisexual women tended to show more mixed patterns, with activations more responsive to female stimuli in sensory processing areas, and activations more responsive to male stimuli in areas associated with social cognition.

Neural Correlates of Gender Face Perception in Transgender People

“…For this reason, we measured the differential activation deriving by the contrast female vs. male faces and not the absolute activations induced by the perception of male or female faces. Since other investigations conducted with different tasks have shown that sexual attraction can affect brain activations [25,66,67], we cannot exclude the contribution of sexual orientation in our results. However, we believe that the sexual orientation may marginally if ever have influenced our results.…”

Neuroanatomy and function of human sexual behavior: A neglected or unknown issue?

“…Aside from the well-known role of the NAc (that is a neural structure of the ventral striatum) in the reward processing, various neuroimaging studies demonstrated an increased activity of the ventral striatum in response to erotic stimuli (Brand, Snagowski, Laier, & Maderwald, 2016;Childress et al, 2008). Notably, the NAc is part of a wide network of neural correlates of sexual arousal and it has been reported to track sexual preferences in heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual individuals, both in men and in women (Safron et al, 2007(Safron et al, , 2017(Safron et al, , 2018. In addition, Oei, Rombouts, Soeter, Gerven, and Both (2012) showed that DA stimulates activity in the NAc and dACC, in response to subconsciously perceived sexual stimuli, thus suggesting the possibility for DA to influence sexual motivation at its earliest onset, which seems to occur outside awareness (Oei et al, 2012).…”

Structural, Functional, and Metabolic Brain Differences as a Function of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation: A Systematic Review of the Human Neuroimaging Literature

“…With regard to sexual orientation, the neuroimaging literature is scarce. Investigations have reported structural Manzouri and Savic, 2018;Ponseti et al, 2007;Witelson et al, 2008), functional (Hu et al, , 2013Kagerer et al, 2011;Manzouri & Savic, 2018;Paul et al, 2008;Perry et al, 2013;Ponseti et al, 2009;Safron et al, , 2018Sylva, 2013;Zeki and Romaya, 2010;Zhang et al, 2011) and metabolic (Berglund et al, 2006;Kinnunen et al, 2004; differences between heterosexual and homosexual individuals, but an attempt to summarize and analyze these reports is, to the best of our knowledge, non-existent.…”