Neuroimaging Techniques as a New Tool to Study the Neural Correlates Involved in Human Male Sexual Arousal

During the last five years, neuroimaging techniques such as Positron Emission Tomography (PET) and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) appeared as new tools to study the neural correlates of human male sexual arousal (SA). In this paper, some of the main methodological aspects of these studies will be summarized, including the participants, the way to induce sexual arousal within the scanner and the different types of analyses performed. In the second part, some of the cerebral areas that have been related to sexual information processing are presented. Among others, cerebral areas that have been related to cognitive processes involved in SA are first presented: the orbitofrontal cortex and parietal lobules. We then focus on recent studies that concurrently measured cerebral and penile responses by plethysmography. Some cerebral areas where significant correlations were found between the hemodynamic cerebral and the plethysmographic signals are presented. Finally, as the use of different penile plethysmographic methods were referred to in the literature, we consider the prospects of their use for the study of the neural correlates of human male SA.