Cerebral Activation Associated with Sexual Arousal in Individuals with High Rates of Sexual Behavior = Cerebral Activation Associated with Sexual Arousal in Individuals with High Rates of Sexual Behavior

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

There is a lot of evidence in psychological literature that high rates of sexual behavior can be problematic. It is easy to find individuals whose frequent sexual behavior appears to interfere with their personal happiness and social adjustment. With increasing concerns, research has paid attention to the characteristics of individuals with high rates of sexual behavior, yet relatively little is known about behavioral and neural mechanisms underlying frequent sexual behavior, especially with respect to sexual arousal. We here report data from an event-related fMRI study that investigated the neural correlates of sexual arousal processing using erotic pictures in individuals with high rates of sexual behavior (HSB group) and healthy controls. To examine neural characteristics of sexual desire/arousal, 7 subjects with HSB and 6 age-matched healthy control subjects were scanned while they passively viewed alternating short trials of erotic pictures and neutral picture via monitor. The average SAST (Sexual Addiction Screening Test) score of participants selected as the HSB group in this experiment was 12.4 (SD = 1.84), and the average SAST score of the control group was 1.33 (SD = 2.75). Relative to healthy controls, HSB group showed 1) more sexually aroused (t = 7.172, p < 0.0001), 2) greater activation in the left insula (uncorrected, p < 0.001). These findings suggest that hypersexual desire/arousal may be an important characteristic of in individuals with high rates of sexual behavior.