RESEARCH ARTICLE


The Motivated Brain: Insights from Neuroimaging Studies of Human Male Sexual Affiliation Context



Harold Mouras*, 1
1 Laboratoire de Neurosciences Fonctionnelles et Pathologies, UFR de Médecine, Université de Picardie Jules Verne, 3 rue des Louvels, 80 036 Amiens Cedex 1, France


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Creative Commons License
© Harold Mouras; Licensee Bentham Open

open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits unrestricted, non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the work is properly cited.

* Address correspondence to this author at the Laboratoire de Neurosciences Fonctionnelles et Pathologies, UFR de Médecine, Université de Picardie Jules Verne, 3 rue des Louvels, 80 036 Amiens Cedex 1, France; Tel: +33 3 22 82 54 42; E-mail: hmouras@gmail.com


Abstract

The advent of functional neuroimaging techniques has allowed to address the question of the role of the brain in a new light, being now able to record brain activity under different kinds of perceptual, cognitive or motor paradigms. Two exponentially emerging fields, i.e. social and affective neurosciences, converge on topics such as brain processing of emotional information issued by the congeners. As any social interaction obbeys a motivational dimension of interattraction, it is therefore important to study the role of the brain in specific functional contexts. In this paper we show how the emergence of a new field crystallized around the study of brain circuits involved in sexual affiliation has helped providing important results to understand the brain’s role in social motivated interactions. Specifically, these studies show for this involvement a central physiological component and its cortical representation that seems to be essential for social interactions with motivational component.

Keywords: Motivated brain, neuroimaging studies, social interactions.