Neural substrates of sexual arousal revisited: Dependent on sex

Challenging previous work (1), a recent metaanalysis suggests “that the neuronal circuitries activated by visual sexual stimuli are independent of biological sex” (ref. 2, p. 15671). Neuroimaging metaanalyses are indispensable for robust conclusions on neuronal correlates of mental functions (3). To attain this goal, best-practice guidelines have been jointly proposed by the developers of all major analytic approaches (3). A careful look at the aforementioned analysis reveals several issues that may have affected the outcome in nontrivial ways. The authors performed contrast analyses “to combinatorically compare ALE [activation likelihood estimation] datasets in a pairwise manner, in particular with respect to … sex” (ref. 2, p. 15675). According to their appendix and laudably shared dataset, experiments comprising mixed samples (i.e., men and women) might have been assigned to both sex-specific metaanalyses that were eventually compared, obscuring potential sex differences. Another 11% of experiments did not report within-sex brain activations but reported group comparisons, sample size information seemed off for about 25%, and … [↵][1]1To whom correspondence may be addressed. Email: timm.poeppl{at}rwth-aachen.de or simon.eickhoff{at}med.uni-duesseldorf.de. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1