Sex differences in the neural correlates of affective experience.
Sex differences in the neural correlates of affective experience.
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DOI：
10.1093/scan/nst030
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发表时间：
2014-05
影响因子：
4.2
通讯作者：
Y. Moriguchi;Alexandra Touroutoglou;B. Dickerson;L. F. Barrett
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Y. Moriguchi;Alexandra Touroutoglou;B. Dickerson;L. F. Barrett
人们认为女性的情绪比男性更强烈，但科学证据并不明确。在这项研究中，我们测试了一个新的假设，即男性和女性在情感体验的神经关联上不同，而不是神经活动的强度不同，女性更专注于内部(内部感觉)，而男性更专注于外部(视觉)。成年男性(n=17)和女性(n=17)完成了一项功能磁共振成像研究，同时观看情感强烈的图像，并对他们主观唤醒的时刻感觉进行评级。我们发现，在观看唤起图像时，男性和女性在每时每刻的情感体验强度上没有总体上的差异，但正如预测的那样，女性在代表身体感觉的前脑岛皮质中显示出更大的瞬时唤醒评级和神经反应之间的关联，而男性在他们的瞬时唤醒评级和视觉皮质中的神经反应之间显示出更强的相关性。男性脑岛背侧前皮质和前扣带回皮质之间的功能连接也有所增强，后者构成了调节注意力向世界转移的回路。这些结果表明，相同的情感体验在不同的人身上实现的方式不同，女性的情感相对更专注于自我，而男性的情感相对更专注于世界。
People believe that women are more emotionally intense than men, but the scientific evidence is equivocal. In this study, we tested the novel hypothesis that men and women differ in the neural correlates of affective experience, rather than in the intensity of neural activity, with women being more internally (interoceptively) focused and men being more externally (visually) focused. Adult men (n = 17) and women (n = 17) completed a functional magnetic resonance imaging study while viewing affectively potent images and rating their moment-to-moment feelings of subjective arousal. We found that men and women do not differ overall in their intensity of moment-to-moment affective experiences when viewing evocative images, but instead, as predicted, women showed a greater association between the momentary arousal ratings and neural responses in the anterior insula cortex, which represents bodily sensations, whereas men showed stronger correlations between their momentary arousal ratings and neural responses in the visual cortex. Men also showed enhanced functional connectivity between the dorsal anterior insula cortex and the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, which constitutes the circuitry involved with regulating shifts of attention to the world. These results demonstrate that the same affective experience is realized differently in different people, such that women's feelings are relatively more self-focused, whereas men's feelings are relatively more world-focused.