P.3.006 Effects of visual adaptation on perception of and satisfaction with own body size: two randomised studies

The Thin White Line: Adaptation Suggests a Common Neural Mechanism for Judgments of Asian and Caucasian Body Size

“…Body size and shape misperception (BSSM) – a phenomenon in which some individuals overestimate or underestimate their body size – affects a large and growing segment of the population of Western countries (Powell et al, 2010; Quick et al, 2015) and is becoming increasingly common in Asian societies and around the world (Wardle et al, 2006). Body size overestimation is associated with high levels of body dissatisfaction, anxiety, and depression and is a risk factor for the development of eating disorders and compulsive exercise behaviour, particularly in young women (Griffiths et al, 2016; Bould et al, 2018). In Malaysia, a rapidly developing Southeast Asian country, 20.5% of underweight young women in a large epidemiological study overestimated their body size (Khor et al, 2009), while a large longitudinal study of young people in 24 Western countries found that over 40% of non-overweight young women overestimated their body size (Quick et al, 2015).…”

“…This connection between exposure to Western media and body image distortion is well established, with recent studies showing that the introduction of television into a region is associated with thinner ideal body size (Boothroyd et al, 2016), even when controlling for potential confounds such as nutritional status (Jucker et al, 2017). However, some evidence suggests that exposure to idealized bodies may have less pronounced effects on body dissatisfaction (which is affected by BSSM; Bould et al, 2018) for individuals of races not represented in the images (DeBraganza and Hausenblas, 2010).…”