Associations of observer’s gender, Body Mass Index and internalization of societal beauty ideals to visual body processing

Abstract

We examined whether visual processing mechanisms of the body of conspecifics are different in women and men and whether these rely on westernised socio-cultural ideals and body image concerns. Twenty-four women and 24 men performed a visual discrimination task of upright or inverted images of female or male bodies and faces (Experiment 1) and objects (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, both groups of women and men showed comparable abilities in the discrimination of upright and inverted bodies and faces. However, the gender of the human stimuli yielded different effects on participants’ performance, so that female faces, and male bodies appeared to be processed less configurally than female bodies and male faces, respectively. Interestingly, the reduction of configural processing for male bodies was significantly predicted by participants’ Body Mass Index (BMI) and their level of internalization of muscularity. Our findings suggest that configural visual processing of bodies and faces in women and men may be linked to a selective attention to detail needed for discriminating salient physical (perhaps sexual) cues of conspecifics. Importantly, BMI and muscularity internalization of beauty ideals may also play a crucial role in this mechanism.

Emotion is perceived accurately from isolated body parts, especially hands

“…Several studies have shown that inversion also disrupts recognition of emotional expressions in faces (e.g., McKelvie, 1995;Prkachin, 2003;Bombari et al, 2013). Inversion effects have also been reported for bodies, for a range of judgments, including of body posture (Reed et al, 2003(Reed et al, , 2006, identity (Robbins & Coltheart, 2012;Cazzato, Walters, & Urgesi, 2021), size (Walsh, Vormberg, Hannaford, & Longo, 2018), attractiveness (Cook & Duchaine, 2011), and orientation (Bernard et al, 2012;Schmidt & Kistemaker, 2015). Of particular relevance here, body inversion effects have also been reported for emotional expressions, for stimuli including still photographs (Thoma et al, 2020), movies (Atkinson, Tunstall, & Dittrich, 2007;Zieber, Kangas, Hock, & Bhatt, 2014), and point-light displays (Dittrich, Troscianko, Lea, & Morgan, 1996;Clarke, Bradshaw, Field, Hampson, & Rose;Atkinson et al, 2007).…”

‘Magic cosmetic fillers’: Appearance-enhancement effects on self–face recognition

“…Taken together, these results may speak in favour of the hypothesis that a different engagement of local- vs. global-based processing is required to resolve self- to other-face discrimination, if one takes into account the two short and longer viewing times. For instance, several investigations using a face inversion task, according to which inverting a face can severely disrupt holistic, configural-based processing for faces [ 31 , 32 ], and consequently causing poor recognition, have shown that the processing of the own face relies on featural information [ 33 , 34 ]. Brédart [ 35 ] shows that while we rely mainly on configuration in recognizing others, local information is also important in recognizing ourselves.…”

Making heads or tails of body inversion effects: Do heads matter?

“…However, cautions have been raised such as the task being mirror reversal rather than visual processing of bodies [see 23 , 24 ]. More recently, Cazzato et al [ 25 ] found no effect of participant gender and found BIEs for both female and male stimuli, but with better processing of inverted male bodies. With the findings here, there are perhaps effects of embodiment or greater identification or perceptual sensitivity with participants focusing more on bodies of the same gender.…”