Functional Neural Substrates of Football Fanaticism: Different Pattern of Brain Responses and Connectivity in Fanatics.

AIM Sports activities provide social interaction for humans. Commitment to a given team is a salient feature of being a sports fan and becomes a prominent part of self-identification for fanatics. Emotion, subjective hedonic experience, and non-romantic love are related to fan behaviors. Few studies have evaluated the neural basis of sports fanaticism. METHODS Thirty men, including 16 football fanatics and 14 non-fanatics, with a mean age of 27.4 ± 6.4 years (range, 20-48) were enrolled. Subjects underwent fMRI while watching a set of goals scored by favorite, rival, and neutral teams. RESULTS The analysis of variance in GLM revealed a significant Group-by-Condition interaction effect in the bilateral dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), more prominent in the left hemisphere. In the post-hoc comparisons, fanatics showed increased activation in bilateral dACC, supplementary motor cortex (SMA), superior frontal cortex, right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and right insula for favorite>neutral contrast and an increased activation in bilateral dACC and SMA for rival>neutral contrast. Seed-based connectivity analyses using the areas with significant activation differences revealed increased connectivity between dACC and several regions, including left posterior lateral temporal area, insula, and bilateral medial temporal, medial superior frontal areas as well as basal ganglia in fanatics compared to non-fanatics. CONCLUSION Our results suggest that football fanatics exhibit different brain activation and connectivity pattern, both under favorable and unfavorable conditions. This brain activity and connectivity pattern under emotionally-laden conditions may represent higher responses to rewards, higher emotional valence attribution, and stronger motivational state of the football fanatics that might underlie their unusual behavioral responses. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.