Body-image disturbance in obesity

Abstract

It is accepted that obese individuals have a body-image (61) disturbance. We assumed that distorted size estimations are a characteristic 61 disturbance in the obese and that their 81 is on a developmentally lower level than in controls. The hypotheses were that in the obese there would be less differentiation between kinaesthetically and graphically expressed 51 and between BI and personality variables. The subjects were 74 obese and 66 nonobese women, matched in demographic variables. They were administered individually a Body-Size Estimation task, Human Figure Drawing, Fear of Death questionnaire, and TAT cards. The results were that in the obese, body-size estimations were correlated more with the width and pathological signs in the drawings, MMPl scales, fear of death, and TAT themes. The findings supported the hypotheses and imply that in the obese the BI constitutes a favorable medium for projections. It is recommended to complement the between-group by the within-group approach.

Tactile distance anisotropy on the feet

“…Indeed, there are reasons to think that such distortions may generalise beyond touch entirely. Overestimation of body width has been reported in tasks involving proprioceptive localization of landmarks on the hand (e.g., Coelho et al, 2017;Ganea & Longo, 2017;Longo & Haggard, 2010) and face (e.g., Longo & Holmes, 2020;Mora et al, 2018), visual comparison judgments of hand size (e.g., Tamè et al, 2017), localization of body landmarks on a screen (e.g., Fuentes, Longo, et al, 2013a;Fuentes, Pazzaglia, Longo, Scivoletto, & Haggard, 2013b;Fuentes, Runa, et al, 2013c), and a range of body size estimation tasks from the eating disorders literature, such as the moving caliper method (e.g., Dolan et al, 1987;Halmi et al, 1977;Hundleby & Bourgouin, 1993), the adjustable light beam apparatus (e.g., Dolce et al, 1987;Thompson et al, 1986), kinesthetic judgments (e.g., Kreitler & Chemerinski, 1990), and the imagemarking procedure (e.g., Gorham & Hundleby, 1988;Thomas & Freeman, 1991). Some recent authors have suggested that analogous distortions may affect non-body objects (Peviani et al, 2021;Salvato et al, 2020;Saulton et al, 2014;Saulton et al, 2016).…”