Researchers at Imperial College London infused kisspeptin, a hormone that controls release of reproductive hormones from the brain, into 29 healthy young men, then scanned their brains with fMRI while they viewed romantic and sexual images alongside neutral ones.
In the peer-reviewed study, men given kisspeptin showed stronger activity in brain regions tied to sexual and emotional processing while viewing sexual and romantic couple images than when they received a saline infusion instead, a difference that showed up on the same men on different days.
The design let each man serve as his own comparison, since the same person was scanned once with kisspeptin and once with saline, which strengthens the finding despite a modest total number of participants. The study tested only healthy men and only brain activity, not behavior or relationships, and the same group has since explored kisspeptin's effects on mood and anxiety-related brain processing as a separate line of research.
Read the original study
Comninos et al., Journal of Clinical Investigation, 2017 · doi.org/10.1172/JCI89519
A fertility hormone, reaching into the brain.
Source
- Comninos, A. N., Wall, M. B., Demetriou, L., Shah, A. J., Clarke, S. A., Narayanaswamy, S., Nesbitt, A., Izzi-Engbeaya, C., Prague, J. K., Abbara, A., Ratnasabapathy, R., Salem, V., Nijher, G. M., Jayasena, C. N., Tanner, M., Bassett, P., Mehta, A., Rabiner, E. A., Hönigsperger, C., . . . Dhillo, W. S. (2017). Kisspeptin modulates sexual and emotional brain processing in humans. The Journal of Clinical Investigation, 127(2), 709–719. https://doi.org/10.1172/JCI89519