Neural correlates of subliminally presented visual sexual stimuli

[Display omitted] •Subliminal sexual stimuli evoke activations in areas associated with sexual arousal.•Scrambled masks can reduce stimulus visibility without blocking fMRI effects.•Preferred images evoke higher activations in motivational and autonomic regions.•Visibility is enhanced with sexually preferred stimuli.•Preferred less-explicit stimuli can induce sexual arousal. In the context of forensic psychiatry, it is crucial that diagnoses of deviant sexual interests are resistant to manipulation. In a first attempt to promote the development of such tools, the current fMRI study focusses on the examination of hemodynamic responses to preferred, in contrast to non-preferred, sexual stimuli with and without explicit sexual features in 24 healthy heterosexual subjects. The subliminal stimulus presentation of sexual stimuli could be a new approach to reduce vulnerability to manipulation. Meaningful images and scrambled images were applied as masks. Recognition performance was low, but interestingly, sexual preference and explicitness modulated stimulus visibility, suggesting interactions between networks of sexual arousal and consciousness. With scrambled masks, higher activations for sexually preferred images and for explicit images were found in areas associated with sexual arousal (Stoleru, Fonteille, Cornelis, Joyal, & Moulier, 2012). We conclude that masked sexual stimuli can evoke activations in areas associated with supraliminal induced sexual arousal.