Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 8a
. Beauty Project. Behavioral and fMRI results regarding the viewing of beautiful vs. average faces
adapted with permission from Aharon et al. (3). A sample of the four picture types used in these tasks (from
left to right) is shown at top: beautiful female (BF), average female (AF), beautiful male (BM), and average
male (AM). In the graph just below these sample face pictures, rating responses are shown for eight hetero-
sexual males who rated picture attractiveness on a 1-7 scale for a randomized sequence of these pictures. The
responses grouped themselves with tight standard deviations in the four categories illustrated at top. This
process was interpreted as a "liking" response, whereas the keypress procedure (whose results are shown as
the second graph down from the top) was interpreted as a "wanting" response (25). For the keypress proce-
dure, a separate cohort of 15 heterosexual males performed a task where picture viewing time was a function
of the number of their keypresses. Within each gender, the faces were always presented in a new random
order, with beautiful and average faces intermixed (3). On the lowest graph, percent BOLD signal from the
NAc for a third cohort of heterosexual males is shown for each face category relative to a fixation point
baseline. Significant by a random effects analysis, the fMRI results in the NAc were driven by the response to
the beautiful female and the beautiful male faces, and more closely approximated the "wanting" response
rather than the "liking" response. On the right, a pseudocolor statistical map of signal collected during the
beautiful female condition vs. the beautiful male condition (with
p
-value coding bar) is juxtaposed on a cor-
onal group structural image in gray tone.
As a quantitative measure of relative preference, non-rewarding stimuli pro-
duced different regional signal profiles to rewarding stimuli (3), an observation
that was further supported by a study using thermal pain (19) (Figure 9). This
study of judgments of relative preference or utility along with the monetary
study based on prospect theory (38) are early examples of the developing field
