Boy’s love fans versus non-fans in the sexual identity and neural response in the digital age’s young females
With the omnipresence of online social media, Boys’ Love (BL) culture has found a burgeoning audience among young females. However, we know very little about the audience of this online cultural phenomena, also the potential implications of BL culture to female remain under-explored. Study 1 conducted a survey to investigate the BL audience’s demography data and attitudes to homosexual ect. The results of the questionnaire analysis showed that the sexual orientation and psychological gender of the female BL audiences are more diverse. In addition, we also find the audience spend a lot of time on BL. Study 2 focused on the BL senior fans to explore the neural and behavioral response of female while looking at Boys’ Love(BL) stimuli and Heterosexual love stimuli by fNIRS. Behavioral results showed that there was no main effect of reaction time and accuracy between the BL-fans and non-BL-fans. Neural results confirmed that the Oxy-Hb responses for BL-love stimuli in BL-fans was significantly lower than the non-BL-fans. In addition, the interaction effect showed that the Oxy-Hb responses was significantly higher for BL-love stimuli than for heterosexual love stimuli in non-BL-fans, and no difference was found in BL-fans. This finding, maybe along with the discovery that the more pornography a person was exposed to, the higher the brain dopamine threshold, and the subsequent weakening of the neural response to sexual stimulation. The research leads to the conclusion that long term exposed to Boys’ Love may decrease the reward sensitivity to BL stimuli and weakens the brain’s response of the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (rVLPFC) to BL stimuli.