TY - JOUR
T1 - Beautiful faces have variable reward value
T2 - fMRI and behavioral evidence
AU - Aharon, Itzhak
AU - Etcoff, Nancy
AU - Ariely, Dan
AU - Chabris, Christopher F.
AU - O'Connor, Ethan
AU - Breiter, Hans C.
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by grants to Dr. Breiter from the National Institutes of Drug Abuse (grants #00265 and #09467), the Office of National Drug Control Policy and Counterdrug Technology Assessment Center (ONDCP-CTAC), and Drs. Breiter and Aharon from the National Center for Responsible Gaming (NCRG). Dr. Breiter was also supported by the National Foundation for Functional Brain Imaging. Dr. Etcoff was supported by the Lynn M. Reid Fellowship of Harvard Medical School, and Dr. Chabris by a postdoctoral fellowship from the National Institutes of Health through the MGH-NMR Center. We would like to thank Alex Pentland and Elizabeth Huffman for their help and assistance and Mark E. Glickman for statistical consultation.
PY - 2001/11/8
Y1 - 2001/11/8
N2 - The brain circuitry processing rewarding and aversive stimuli is hypothesized to be at the core of motivated behavior. In this study, discrete categories of beautiful faces are shown to have differing reward values and to differentially activate reward circuitry in human subjects. In particular, young heterosexual males rate pictures of beautiful males and females as attractive, but exert effort via a keypress procedure only to view pictures of attractive females. Functional magnetic resonance imaging at 3 T shows that passive viewing of beautiful female faces activates reward circuitry, in particular the nucleus accumbens. An extended set of subcortical and paralimbic reward regions also appear to follow aspects of the keypress rather than the rating procedures, suggesting that reward circuitry function does not include aesthetic assessment.
AB - The brain circuitry processing rewarding and aversive stimuli is hypothesized to be at the core of motivated behavior. In this study, discrete categories of beautiful faces are shown to have differing reward values and to differentially activate reward circuitry in human subjects. In particular, young heterosexual males rate pictures of beautiful males and females as attractive, but exert effort via a keypress procedure only to view pictures of attractive females. Functional magnetic resonance imaging at 3 T shows that passive viewing of beautiful female faces activates reward circuitry, in particular the nucleus accumbens. An extended set of subcortical and paralimbic reward regions also appear to follow aspects of the keypress rather than the rating procedures, suggesting that reward circuitry function does not include aesthetic assessment.
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U2 - 10.1016/S0896-6273(01)00491-3
DO - 10.1016/S0896-6273(01)00491-3
M3 - Article
C2 - 11709163
AN - SCOPUS:0035829649
VL - 32
SP - 537
EP - 551
JO - Neuron
JF - Neuron
SN - 0896-6273
IS - 3
ER -