“Neural Correlates of Sexual Cue Reactivity in Individuals with and without Compulsive Sexual Behaviours” (2014): Excerpt analyzing Steele et al., 2013

Link to full study – “Neural Correlates of Sexual Cue Reactivity in Individuals with and without Compulsive Sexual Behaviours” (2014)

Excerpt analyzing “Steele et al., 2013″ (citation 25 is Steele et al.):

Our findings suggest dACC activity reflects the role of sexual desire, which may have similarities to a study on the P300 in CSB subjects correlating with desire [25]. We show differences between the CSB group and healthy volunteers whereas this previous study did not have a control group. The comparison of this current study with previous publications in CSB focusing on diffusion MRI and the P300 is difficult given methodological differences. Studies of the P300, an event related potential used to study attentional bias in substance use disorders, show elevated measures with respect to use of nicotine [54], alcohol [55], and opiates [56], with measures often correlating with craving indices. The P300 is also commonly studied in substance-use disorders using oddball tasks in which low-probability targets are frequently mixed with high-probability non-targets. A meta-analysis showed that substance-use-disordered subjects and their unaffected family members had decreased P300 amplitude compared to healthy volunteers [57]. These findings suggest substance-use disorders may be characterized by impaired allocation of attentional resources to task-relevant cognitive information (non-drug targets) with enhanced attentional bias to drug cues. The decrease in P300 amplitude may also be an endophenotypic marker for substance-use disorders. Studies of event-related potentials focusing on motivation relevance of cocaine and heroin cues further report abnormalities in the late components of the ERP (>300 milliseconds; late positive potential, LPP) in frontal regions, which may also reflect craving and attention allocation [58]–[60]. The LPP is believed to reflect both early attentional capture (400 to 1000 msec) and later sustained processing of motivationally significant stimuli. Subjects with cocaine use disorder had elevated early LPP measures compared to healthy volunteers suggesting a role for early attentional capture of motivated attention along with attenuated responses to pleasant emotional stimuli. However, the late LPP measures were not significantly different from those in healthy volunteers [61]. The generators of the P300 event-related potential for target-related responses is believed to be the parietal cortex and cingulate [62]. Thus, both dACC activity in the present CSB study and P300 activity reported in a previous CSB study may reflect similar underlying processes of attentional capture. Similarly, both studies show a correlation between these measures with enhanced desire. Here we suggest that dACC activity correlates with desire, which may reflect an index of craving, but does not correlate with liking suggestive of on an incentive-salience model of addictions.