0
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: not found

      Are attractive people rewarding? Sex differences in the neural substrates of facial attractiveness.

      Journal of cognitive neuroscience
      MIT Press - Journals

      Read this article at

      ScienceOpenPublisherPMC
      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          The current study examined the neural substrates of facial attractiveness judgments. Based on the extant behavioral literature, it was hypothesized that brain regions involved in identifying the potential reward value of a stimulus would be more active when men viewed attractive women than when women viewed attractive men. To test this hypothesis, we conducted an event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment during which participants provided explicit attractiveness judgments for faces of the opposite sex. These individual ratings were subsequently used to perform analyses aimed at identifying the brain regions preferentially responsive to attractive faces for both sex groups. The results revealed that brain regions comprising the putative reward circuitry (e.g., nucleus accumbens [NAcc], orbito-frontal cortex [OFC]) showed a linear increase in activation with increased judgments of attractiveness. However, further analysis also revealed sex differences in the recruitment of OFC, which distinguished attractive and unattractive faces only for male participants.

          Related collections

          Author and article information

          Journal
          18211242
          3848031
          10.1162/jocn.2008.20062

          Comments

          Comment on this article

          scite_