Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck
Once believed to be the brain’s “threat detector,” new research from the University of Illinois suggests that the amygdala plays a key role in determining how people respond to members of the opposite sex throughout their lives – even as those responses change over time.
In findings reported earlier this week in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, UI psychology and Beckman Institute professor Eva Telzer and her colleagues explain that they found signals in that part of the brain which reflect both the aversion of members of the opposite gender in young kids, and the growing interest in the other sex that typically takes place during puberty.
The ‘cooties’ phase eventually gives way to apathy…
Telzer and her colleagues evaluated the attitudes of 93 children towards both their same-sex and opposite-sex peers, and used functional MRI scans to track the flow of oxygenated blood in the brains of 52 youngsters. They found that the amygdalas of children between the ages of four and seven respond more to opposite-sex faces, but saw no difference in older prepubescent kids.
The UI professor explained that it was not surprising that very young children pay close attention to gender: “We know that there are developmental changes in terms of the significance of gender boundaries in young kids. We also know about the whole ‘cooties’ phenomenon,” in which young children act as if members of the opposite sex could infect them with some parasite or disease if they get too close. Children at this age prefer company of their same-sex peers, she noted.
“Only the youngest children in our sample demonstrated a behavioral sex bias such that they rated same-sex peers as having more positive (and less negative) attributes than opposite-sex peers,” the researchers wrote. The interest in opposite-sex peers tends to fade later in childhood, Telzer added, and the amygdala of 10- to 12-year-old kids did not respond differently in any way when show the faces of both same-sex and opposite-sex peers.
… but once puberty hits, everything gets turned upside-down!
Once puberty hits, the youngsters once again become increasingly interested in members of the opposite-sex, and they may begin experiencing a crush – becoming infatuated with a member of the other gender, the National Institute of Mental Health-funded study concluded.
“When puberty hits, gender becomes more significant again, whether it’s because your body is changing, or because of sexual attraction or you are becoming aware of more rigid sexual boundaries as you become more sexually mature,” said Telzer. “The brain is responding very appropriately, in terms of what’s changing developmentally.”
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