Perceptions of Female Body Size and Shape in China, Hong Kong, and the United Kingdom

Mo, Josephine J. Y.; Cheung, Kate W. K.; Gledhill, Lucinda J.; Pollet, Thomas V.; Boothroyd, Lynda G.; Tovée, Martin J.

doi:10.1177/1069397113510272

Cited by 14 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 79 publications

(169 reference statements)

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“…These findings were in agreement with previous observation that female bodies with a low but healthy BMI often attract the highest attractiveness ranking (Mo et al, 2013;Tovée et al, 1998). The fact that size 6 was rated similarly to size 14 suggested that thinner is not necessarily more attractive.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 93%

Women gaze behaviour in assessing female bodies: the effects of clothing, body size, own body composition and body satisfaction

Cundall

Guo

2015

Psychological Research

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Often with minimally clothed figures depicting extreme body sizes, previous studies have shown women tend to gaze at evolutionary determinants of attractiveness when viewing female bodies, possibly for self-evaluation purposes, and their gaze distribution is modulated by own body dissatisfaction level. To explore to what extent women's body-viewing gaze behaviour is affected by clothing type, dress size, subjective measurements of regional body satisfaction and objective measurements of own body composition (e.g., chest size, body mass index, waist-to-hip ratio), in this self-paced body attractiveness and body size judgement experiment, we compared healthy, young women's gaze distributions when viewing female bodies in tight and loose clothing of different dress sizes. In contrast to tight clothing, loose clothing biased gaze away from the waist-hip to the leg region, and subsequently led to enhanced body attractiveness ratings and body size underestimation for larger female bodies, indicating the important role of clothing in mediating women's body perception. When viewing preferred female bodies, women's higher satisfaction of a specific body region was associated with an increased gaze towards neighbouring body areas, implying satisfaction might reduce the need for comparison of confident body parts; furthermore undesirable body composition measurements were correlated with a gaze avoidance process if the construct was less changeable (i.e. chest size) but a gaze comparison process if the region was more changeable (i.e. body mass index, dress size). Clearly, own body satisfaction and body composition measurements had an evident impact on women's body-viewing gaze allocation, possibly through different cognitive processes.3

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 93%

Women gaze behaviour in assessing female bodies: the effects of clothing, body size, own body composition and body satisfaction

Cundall

Guo

2015

Psychological Research

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“…Therefore, it is conceivable that this might lead to a difference in how bodies were judged. However, a comparison of data collected with the same set of images using print-outs of body photographs as well as computer displays found no differences in the pattern of ratings when the two modes of presentation were compared (Mo et al 2014). The current results also suggest that there is no significant difference between using a 2-AFC versus a VAS method of recording attractiveness judgements.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 47%

Can we believe judgements of human physical attractiveness?

Tovée

Taylor

Cornelissen

2017

Evolution and Human Behavior

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A key question in attractiveness studies is the validity of the reported results outside the narrow confines of the experimental paradigm used. Does the range of physical features in a set of pictures used to test attractiveness judgments predict the individual ratings of each body? Or does each stimulus have an attractiveness value independent of the range of attractiveness found in the image set of which it is a part? An additional problem is that because participants are often shown a relatively large array of images in a short space of time, this may produce perceptual biases which could cause a short-term shift in attractiveness preferences which are not usually found in real life mate choice decisions.To address this issue we asked 20 participants (10 male and 10 female) to judge the attractiveness of 20 digital photographs of female bodies. We then asked a different set of 400 people (who had not seen the body pictures) to judge the attractiveness of one of the bodies from the set (so each body was rated in isolation by 10 male and 10 female participants). We then compared the attractiveness judgement each body received when seen independently versus when it was seen within the context of a set of bodies. The results showed no significant difference between the two conditions which suggests that each body has an attractiveness value independent of the attractiveness of the other bodies with which it is viewed.

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“…Men also report greater attraction towards pictures of women with low WHRs (Dixson, Li, & Dixson, 2010;Mo et al, 2014;Singh, 1993Singh, , 2002Suschinsky, Elias, & Krupp, 2007). Given the relation between women's sexual interest and their partner's physical attractiveness, and attractiveness and women's WHRs, it seems that manipulating the WHRs of the women pictured could be used to test whether heterosexual women's viewing times for female pictures are associated with the perceived attractiveness of those pictures and whether their viewing time patterns are gender-specific or not; this was the first goal of the present research.…”

Section: The Role Of Waist-to-hip Ratio and Menstrual Cycle Phasementioning

confidence: 99%

Gender-Specificity in Viewing Time Among Heterosexual Women

Rahman

Zheng

2016

Arch Sex Behav

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Measures of sexual interest tend to be more gender-specific in heterosexual men than in heterosexual women. Cognitive measures, such as viewing time to attractive stimuli, may also show similar patterns of gender-specificity or non-specificity among men and women, and thus serve as useful adjuncts to more direct measures of sexual interest. The objectives of the present research were to determine the extent of gender-specificity in women's viewing times for female pictures (varying in their perceived physical attractiveness) and explore the influence of social comparison of physical appearance on these patterns of responses. In Study 1, we recorded only women's viewing times for pictures of both genders, measured self-reported menstrual cycle phase, and manipulated the waist-to-hip ratio of the women in the female pictures. In Study 2, we recorded women's and men's viewing times, self-reported sexual attraction to pictures of males and females, and physical appearance social comparison.Study 1 found that heterosexual women's viewing time towards female pictures was not associated with manipulation of the perceived attractiveness of those pictures. Study 2 found that heterosexual men were more gender-specific than heterosexual women in their viewing time patterns. We also found that reported sexual attraction and physical appearance social comparison were associated with heterosexual women's viewing times for female pictures, while heterosexual men's viewing times were associated with sexual attraction only. Our results are discussed in relation to the utility of viewing time as an indicator of visual attention towards attractive or sexually appealing visual stimuli.

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Perceptions of Female Body Size and Shape in China, Hong Kong, and the United Kingdom

Cited by 14 publications

References 79 publications

Women gaze behaviour in assessing female bodies: the effects of clothing, body size, own body composition and body satisfaction

Women gaze behaviour in assessing female bodies: the effects of clothing, body size, own body composition and body satisfaction

Can we believe judgements of human physical attractiveness?

Gender-Specificity in Viewing Time Among Heterosexual Women

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