Department of Psychology, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland.
J Sex Med. 2012 Apr;9(4):1048-54. doi: 10.1111/j.1743-6109.2012.02651.x. Epub 2012 Feb 21.
One of the most difficult dilemmas in relationship science and couple therapy concerns the interaction between sexual desire and love. As two mental states of intense longing for union with others, sexual desire and love are, in fact, often difficult to disentangle from one another.
The present review aims to help understand the differences and similarities between these two mental states using a comprehensive statistical meta-analyses of all functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies on sexual desire and love.
Systematic retrospective review of pertinent neuroimaging literature.
Review of published literature on fMRI studies illustrating brain regions associated with love and sexual desire to date.
Sexual desire and love not only show differences but also recruit a striking common set of brain areas that mediate somatosensory integration, reward expectation, and social cognition. More precisely, a significant posterior-to-anterior insular pattern appears to track sexual desire and love progressively.
This specific pattern of activation suggests that love builds upon a neural circuit for emotions and pleasure, adding regions associated with reward expectancy, habit formation, and feature detection. In particular, the shared activation within the insula, with a posterior-to-anterior pattern, from desire to love, suggests that love grows out of and is a more abstract representation of the pleasant sensorimotor experiences that characterize desire. From these results, one may consider desire and love on a spectrum that evolves from integrative representations of affective visceral sensations to an ultimate representation of feelings incorporating mechanisms of reward expectancy and habit learning.
在关系科学和夫妻治疗中，最困难的困境之一是关于性欲望和爱的相互作用。作为与他人融合的强烈渴望的两种心理状态，性欲望和爱实际上往往难以相互区分。
本综述旨在使用对所有关于性欲望和爱的功能磁共振成像（fMRI）研究的综合统计荟萃分析，帮助理解这两种心理状态之间的差异和相似之处。
对相关神经影像学文献进行系统的回顾性审查。
综述迄今为止与爱和性欲望相关的 fMRI 研究的已发表文献。
性欲望和爱不仅表现出差异，而且还招募了一组惊人的共同大脑区域，这些区域介导躯体感觉整合、奖励预期和社会认知。更确切地说，一种显著的后到前岛叶模式似乎逐渐追踪性欲望和爱。
这种特定的激活模式表明，爱建立在情感和愉悦的神经回路之上，增加了与奖励预期、习惯形成和特征检测相关的区域。特别是，在从欲望到爱的过程中，岛叶内的共同激活呈现出前后模式，表明爱源于并代表了欲望所具有的愉悦感觉运动体验的更抽象的表现。从这些结果中，人们可以考虑欲望和爱在一个从情感内脏感觉的综合表现到包含奖励预期和习惯学习机制的最终感觉表现的范围内演变。
