Sex Categorization Among Preschool Children: Increasing Utilization of Sexually Dimorphic Cues

Johnson, Kerri L.; Lurye, Leah E.; Tassinary, Louis G.

doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.2010.01476.x

Cited by 19 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…First, at the very least, waists and chests are sexual because they differentiate people on the basis of biological sex. For example, eye‐tracker studies confirm that people focus on men and women's waists and chests when they engage in gender categorization (Hewig, Trippe, Hecht, Straube, & Miltner, ; Johnson, Lurye, & Tassinary, ; Johnson & Tassinary, ). Second, although genitalia may be regarded as more explicitly sexual than waists and chests, they are rarely revealed in interactions with other people, and thus, people use secondary (versus primary) sex characteristics, including waists and chests, as proxies for reproductive fitness (Singh, ).…”

Section: Are Women's Bodies Reduced To Their Sexual Body Parts In Thementioning

confidence: 99%

Seeing women as objects: The sexual body part recognition bias

Gervais

Vescio

Förster

et al. 2012

Euro J Social Psych

110

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Objectification theory suggests that the bodies of women are sometimes reduced to their sexual body parts. As well, an extensive literature in cognitive psychology suggests that global processing underlies person recognition, whereas local processing underlies object recognition. Integrating these literatures, we introduced and tested the sexual body part recognition bias hypothesis that women’s (versus men’s) bodies would be reduced to their sexual body parts in the minds of perceivers. Specifically, we adopted the parts versus whole body recognition paradigm, which is a robust indicator of local versus global processing. The findings across two experiments showed that women’s bodies were reduced to their sexual body parts in perceivers’ minds. We also found that local processing contributed to the sexual body part recognition bias, whereas global processing tempered it. Implications for sexual objectification and its underlying processes and motives are discussed

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Section: Are Women's Bodies Reduced To Their Sexual Body Parts In Thementioning

confidence: 99%

Seeing women as objects: The sexual body part recognition bias

Gervais

Vescio

Förster

et al. 2012

Euro J Social Psych

110

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Such a possibility is supported by the findings that even much older children sometimes fail in tasks in which they are required to explicitly link cues with sex categories. For example, in Johnson et al (2010), even 4-year-olds failed to associate waist-to-hip ratios with sex categories, something that older children and adults readily do.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thompson and Bentler (1971) reported that 4- to 6-year-old children use hair and body type (muscularity, shape) to discriminate between males and females. Johnson, Lurye, and Tassinary (2010) found that 5- and 6-year-olds use the waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) for sex identification but 4-year-olds do not. Thus, children begin to associate different cues such as hair length, body type, and WHR to males and females at different ages.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The development of sex category representation in infancy: Matching of faces and bodies.

Hock¹,

Kangas²,

Zieber³

et al. 2015

Developmental Psychology

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Sex is a significant social category, and adults derive information about it from both faces and bodies. Research indicates that young infants process sex category information in faces. However, no prior study has examined whether infants derive sex categories from bodies and match faces and bodies in terms of sex. In the current study, 5-month-olds exhibited a preference between sex congruent (face and body of the same sex) versus sex-incongruent (face and body belonging to different genders) images. In contrast, 3.5-month-olds failed to exhibit a preference. Thus, 5-month-olds process sex information from bodies and match it to facial information. However, younger infants’ failure to match suggests that there is a developmental change between 3.5 and 5 months of age in the processing of sex categories. These results indicate that rapid developmental changes lead to fairly sophisticated social information processing quite early in life.

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“…(ii) Materials and procedure Stimuli included 21 computer-generated bodies [4,19,20] that varied in a sexually dimorphic cue, the waist-to-hip ratio (WHR; figure 1). …”

Section: Study 1 (A) Methods (I) Participantsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Person (mis)perception: functionally biased sex categorization of bodies

2012

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Social perception is among the most important tasks that occur in daily life, and perceivers readily appreciate the social affordances of others. Here, we demonstrate that sex categorizations are functionally biased towards a male percept. Perceivers judged body shapes that varied in waist-to-hip ratio to be men if they were not, in reality, exclusive to women, and male categorizations occurred more quickly than female categorizations (studies 1 and 4). This pattern was corroborated when participants identified the average body shapes of men and women (study 2) and when we assessed participants' cognitive representations (study 3). Moreover, these tendencies were modulated by emotion context (study 4). Thus, male categorizations occurred readily and rapidly, demonstrating a pronounced categorization bias and temporal advantage for male judgements.

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Sex Categorization Among Preschool Children: Increasing Utilization of Sexually Dimorphic Cues

Cited by 19 publications

References 31 publications

Seeing women as objects: The sexual body part recognition bias

Seeing women as objects: The sexual body part recognition bias

The development of sex category representation in infancy: Matching of faces and bodies.

Person (mis)perception: functionally biased sex categorization of bodies

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