Author(s)

Gwang-Won Kim, Gwang-Woo Jeong, Jong-Chul Yang

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This study was performed to clarify the sexual orien-tation in a 19-year-old homosexual male and a 20-year-old homosexual female by using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with viewing male and female erotic nude pictures. The sex hor-mone levels of the homosexual male and female were in the normal range of healthy heterosexual males and females, respectively. In both homosexuals more significant brain activities were observed while view-ing the nude pictures of the same genetic sex than those of the opposite sex in the frontal cortex, parietal cortex, occipital cortex, anterior cingulate gyrus, amygdala, midbrain, hippocampus, orbitofrontal cortex, parahippocampal gyrus, thalamus, globus pallidus, and putamen, which are known to be re-sponsive to sexual arousal. The homosexual male and female showed a tendency toward higher sexual arousal to the same genetic sex as comparison with the opposite sex. This finding may be useful to un-derstand the different neural mechanisms on sexual arousal in homosexuals.

Sexual orientation; Homosexual male; Homosexual female; Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)

Kim, G. , Jeong, G. and Yang, J. (2011) Brain activation patterns associated with sexual orientation in homosexual male and female: a case study with 3.0T fMRI. Journal of Biomedical Science and Engineering, 4, 196-199. doi: 10.4236/jbise.2011.43027.