Chung, W., Lim, S., Yoo, J., & Yoon, H. (2013). Gender difference in brain activation to audio-visual sexual stimulation; do women and men experience the same level of arousal in response to the same video clip? International journal of impotence research, 25(4), 138-142. doi: 10.1038/ijir.2012.47 The researchers wanted to examine the factors related to human sexual arousal and their differences in men and women. The research examined the conditions that result in the arousal of women and men. It has been noted previously that the sexual response cycle for women and men is very different. Men have been noted to experience sexual satisfaction from physical attraction while women are affected by emotions and the environment in order to experience sexual satisfaction. Previous research has shown that men respond more to sexual stimuli than women. The reasoning behind this stimulation is vital to establish. Based on this the researchers wanted to investigate the sexual arousal differences between women and men in how they respond to different types of audio-visual stimulation (AVS). The researchers have posited that there is no enough data measuring sexual response from different AVS in women and men.

The authors had 20 participants in the study. The participants comprised of 10 men and 10 women. All the participants were physically and mentally healthy, and right-handed, aged between 20-29 years. All the participants were sexually active, and they did not have any sexual problems. The authors ensured that female subjects were not in their ovulation or menstruation phases to ensure there is no hormonal influence in their sexual responses. The researchers used functional...

Subjects had to randomly watch two types of erotic videos, and they did not receive any prior information on what video they would be watching. The two videos comprised of mood type, which was an erotic film with a storyline and relationship and mood development were the main focus of the video. The second video was a commercial pornography that focused on sexual activity, physical contact, and exposure of genitalia. Subjects had to score their degree of arousal from 1-5 with the highest indicating greater sexual arousal. The researchers collected data from the brain fMRI, and it was integrated.
All the subjects did report sexual arousal from the two types of videos. However, there was a difference in the degree of arousal based on the video and gender. The mean arousal score for the mood type video was 1.86 for men and 2.14 for women, but for the physical type video, the mean score was 2.14 for men and 1.86 for women. The fMRI indicated that in both genders the same areas of the brain were activated by sexual stimulation. The areas are cingulate gyrus, hippocampus, parahippocampus, temporal lobe, frontal lobe, parietal lobe, and insula. The researchers found that there was no significant stimulation of the amygdala in women. The results are statistically significant because the researchers have incorporated fMRI results and self-reporting. Both of which demonstrate or reveal the same results.

The results do support the researchers' hypothesis, but the researchers expected that they would be more activation of the amygdala…