Body Objectification Flashcards
(37 cards)
What is the objectification theory by Frederickson and Roberts (1997)?
Defines sexual objectification as the apprasial of women in terms of their bodies as objects for utilisation leading to negative psychological consequences such as feelings of same, anxiety and self-objectification
Why does objectification occur?
When a women’s sexual parts/functions are separated out from her person (Bartky, 1990)
What did Heflick and Goldenberg find (2009)?
Showed that when M/F Ps were asked to focus on the appearance of a famous woman, they tended to dehumanise her.
What did Gervais investigate (2011)?
Examined the effect of the objectifying gaze on undergraduate women and men’s cognitive performance and body image outcomes, including body surveillance, body shame and body dissatisfaction
What is body surveillance?
Habitual monitoring of the body’s outward appearance (Frederickson & Roberts, 1997)
What is body shame?
Emotional response that follows from measuring oneself against an internalised or cultural standard and percieving oneself as failing to meet that standard (Frederickson & Roberts, 1997)
What is body dissatisfaction?
Awareness of potential discrepancies between women’s actual bodies and cultural appearance ideals (Smolak & Levine, 2001)
What was the methodology of Gervais (2011) experiment?
- 150 undergrads from US uni
- Ps told they were being investigated on teamwork and told they were to report feelings and complete word problems
- Pairs were women and men (they were confederates)
- They were informed that that each dyad would complete several math problems
- Asked to complete a questionnaire to select leader/worker - all Ps assigned to worker condition
- They were then assigned to objectifying gaze or control condition
- In the gaze condition, the leader looked the worker up and down and wrote statements based on looks
What 3 measures were the Ps assigned in Gervais’ experiment?
Math performance, Objectified body consciousness scale (OBCS, McKinley & Hyde, 1996) and Figure Rating Scale (Stunkard, Sorenson & Schulsinger, 1983)
What did the results of Gervais’ study show?
- Women performed significantly worse than menin the maths problems
- Women also performed worse in objectifying gaze condition than men and than their control
What was the most important result from Gervais’ study?
The main effecr of gender was significant for each of the 3 measures, all at p<.001
What was Bernard et al (2012) experiment ?
Used the face/body inversion effecr to study the nature of the perceptual processing of sexualised images of men and women
What was Bernard et al (2012) procedure?
- 78 uni students presented with sexualised M/F photos
- Target wore swimsuit with neutral expression - either upright or inverted
- Each photo presented for 250 ms - Ps tasked to identify photo they saw out of 2
What was Bernard et al (2012) results?
- Both male and female Ps showed inversion effect for sexualised men but not sexualised women - highly significant interaction
What did Bernard’s results highlight?
Both M and F Ps use configural processing when perceiving sexualised men but featural processing when perceiving sexualised women.
How was experiment 1 different to Bernard’s original experiment?
Ps saw all of the pictures in both upright and inverted positions
How was experiement 2a different to Bernard’s original?
Examined the possiblity that masking the sexual body parts by pixelating them would increase configural processing and reduce objectification of women’s bodies
How was experiement 2b different to 2a?
- Only females shown
- Between-subjects pixelation condition
What was Bernard’s experiment 3?
- Examined humanisation as a target feature that interferes with the salience of sexual body parts, causing less objectification and more configural processing of sexualised female bodies
- There was a between subject variable in terms of the message they revcieved before the images
What were the overall results of the replications of Bernard’s study?
- Cognitive phenomena (the inversion effect) can be used to study the perceptual processes at the basis of body objectification.
- Both men and women show a reduced inversion effect (index of object-like featural processing) in response to sexualized images of women compared to that of men.
- Pixelating the sexual body parts or providing humanizing information about the sexualized images of women can increase the inversion effect (index of face-like configural processing) thus reduce objectification.
What did Hietanen and Nummenmaa find?
Both naked and sexualised bodies evoked larger and delayed N170s compared to faces and nonsexualised bodies
What did Stekelenburg and de Gelder find?
Images of inverted bodies elicited a larger N170 at posterior occipitot-temporal sites compared to upriht bodies, whereas this differentiation for inverted objects did not emerge
What did Minnebusch find?
- Similar results to St/de Ge for intact bodies whereas headless bodies elicited a reversed body inversion with smaller N170 amplitude for inverted headless bodies
What was Bernard et al (2018) second experiment?
- 20 Ps with normal vision
- 5 blocks presented in quasi-randomised order: non-sexualised female bodies, non-sexualised male bodies, sexualised female bodies, sexualised male bodies and object stimuli
- 4 pictures appeared 60 times in inverted positions
- Orientation judgement task for Ps attention
