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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access published online on January 29, 2008
Cerebral Cortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhm254
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Sex-Linked Neuroanatomical Basis of Human Altruistic Cooperativeness

Hidenori Yamasue1, Osamu Abe2, Motomu Suga1, Haruyasu Yamada2, Mark A. Rogers1,3, Shigeki Aoki2, Nobumasa Kato1 and Kiyoto Kasai1

1 Department of Neuropsychiatry, Graduate School of Medicine, University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-8655, Japan, 2 Department of Radiology, Graduate School of Medicine, University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-8655, Japan, 3 Department of Psychology, Monash University, Clayton 3800, Victoria, Australia

Address correspondence to Hidenori Yamasue, MD, PhD, Department of Neuropsychiatry, Graduate School of Medicine, University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-8655, Japan. Email: yamasue-tky{at}umin.ac.jp.

Human altruistic cooperativeness, one of the most important components of our highly organized society, is along with a greatly enlarged brain relative to body size a spectacular outlier in the animal world. The "social-brain hypothesis" suggests that human brain expansion reflects an increased necessity for information processing to create social reciprocity and cooperation in our complex society. The present study showed that the young adult females (n = 66) showed greater Cooperativeness as well as larger relative global and regional gray matter volumes (GMVs) than the matched males (n = 89), particularly in the social-brain regions including bilateral posterior inferior frontal and left anterior medial prefrontal cortices. Moreover, in females, higher cooperativeness was tightly coupled with the larger relative total GMV and more specifically with the regional GMV in most of the regions revealing larger in female sex-dimorphism. The global and most of regional correlations between GMV and Cooperativeness were significantly specific to female. These results suggest that sexually dimorphic factors may affect the neurodevelopment of these "social-brain" regions, leading to higher cooperativeness in females. The present findings may also have an implication for the pathophysiology of autism; characterized by severe dysfunction in social reciprocity, abnormalities in social-brain, and disproportionately low probability in females.

Key Words: altruism • cooperativeness • sex difference • social brain • voxel-based morphometry


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