The Sexual OBjectification and EMotion database: A free stimulus set and norming data of sexually objectified and non-objectified female targets expressing multiple emotions

Abstract

Sexual objectification – perceiving or treating a woman as a sexual object – is a widespread phenomenon. Studies on sexual objectification and its consequences have grown dramatically over the last decades covering multiple and diverse areas of research. However, research studying sexual objectification might have limited internal and external validity due to the lack of a controlled and standardized picture database. Moreover, there is a need to extend this research to other fields including the study of emotions. Therefore, in this paper we introduce the SOBEM Database, a free tool consisting of 280 high-resolution pictures depicting objectified and non-objectified female models expressing a neutral face and three different emotions (happiness, anger, and sadness) with different intensity. We report the validation of this dataset by analyzing results of 134 participants judging pictures on the six basic emotions and on a range of social judgments related to sexual objectification. Results showed how the SOBEM can constitute an appropriate instrument to study both sexual objectification per se and its relation with emotions. This database could therefore become an important instrument able to improve the experimental control in future studies on sexual objectification and to create new links with different fields of research.

Why Might Women Justify Dating Violence? The Role of Men’s Sexual Objectification of Their Romantic Partners Within Heterosexual Relationships

“…Sexual objectification-the reduction of a person's value to their body or sexual body parts (Bartky, 1990)-affects perceptions, cognitions, and attitudes toward the objectified targets (e.g., Ruzzante et al, 2022) and causes numerous negative consequences for the victims (e.g., Roberts et al, 2017). Indeed, objectified targets, mostly women, are denied morality, mind, warmth, and competence (e.g., Heflick & Goldenberg, 2009;Loughnan et al, 2010), and they are elaborated similarly to real objects (Vaes et al, 2019), even at a cognitive level (see Bernard et al, 2020 for a recent review; see also Andrighetto et al, 2019).…”