Presentation for the 32nd International Congress of Psychology 18-23 July 2021
Neuroscience of sexual orientation, reward, learning, personality, and flexibility
Over the past several years we have used functional neuroimaging to extend findings from the genital arousal literature, exploring the extent to which category-specific and non-specific response patterns are observed in the brain. With focus on the dopamine-sensitive ventral striatum-a nexus for action selection and reinforcement learning-we have established that homosexual and heterosexual (but not bisexual) men show strong and specific biases for preferred compared with non-preferred sexual stimuli. Women and bisexual men, in contrast, did not show such specific patterns of responding to erotic stimuli. Further work with carefully controlled stimuli will be needed to establish the degree to which non-specific patterns of responding in non-bisexual women may represent a capacity for bisexual attraction. In addition to reviewing this empirical work, I will discuss potential interpretations of the strong involvement of the ventral striatum in sexual responses, and whether this might inform models of sexual orientation evolution and development. Finally, I will also discuss ongoing work involving measures of “network flexibility,” a recently developed graph theoretic approach for assessing capacity for dynamic change over time. This promising technique can be used not only in neuroimaging, but also for any timeseries dataset with a graph structure, so providing new means of studying sexual attraction and behavior. I will discuss neural systems where flexibility may be particularly important for understanding more general exploratory tendencies and personality plasticity, with potential relevance for understanding orientation and sex/gender differences. Time permitting, I will review some of the biological, psychological, and social factors that may promote flexibility, and how these may function as sources of both vulnerability and resilience.
The conference:
www.icp2020.com/