W3: Body Objectification and the Objectification Theory Flashcards
(23 cards)
What is the objectification theory (Fredrickson and Roberts, 1997)?
The appraisal of women in terms of their bodies as objects for utilisation leading to neg consequences e.g. shame, self objectification.
What is the objectifying gaze?
Occurs when a man visually inspects a woman, focusing attention to her body. Can promote self objectification and the internalisation of a third person’s perspective of their bodies.
What is body surveillence?
Habitual monitoring of the body’s outward appearance
What is body shame?
An emotional response that follows from measuring oneself against an internalised or cultural standard and perceiving oneself as failing to meet that standard.
What is body dissatisfaction?
Awareness of potential discrepancies between women’s actual bodies and cultural appearance ideals. This is higher when women interpret weight related criticisms more negatively or compliments more positively.
How did Gervais et al (2011) measure the effect of the objectifying gaze on men and women’s cognitive performance?
Hypothesised that the inversion effect could be used for sexual objectification.
Ppts were told they would either be a leader or a worker but this was rigged so confed would always be leader. Ppts then asked to examine simple maths problems whilst partner created a list of interview qs. They were randomly assigned to either the objectifying gaze or control condition. Objectifying gaze condition was manipulated so that objectifying feedback was given by a confederate or not. Confed gazed at chest or made eye contact if control. To clearly convey sexual nature, feedback was ‘ppt looking good’ for example. Immediately after, ppts completed maths problems and all 3 body measures (body satisfaction, surveillance and shame). Satisfaction was a scale where they were asked to identify their own body type and their ideal type.
What did Gervais et al (2011) find when measuring the effect of the objectifying gaze on men and women’s cognitive performance?
Women performed worse than men on maths problem and women in the objectifying gaze condition performed even worse than control women whereas this difference was not seen for the men.
The main effect of gender was significant for each three body measures
Concluded that objectifying gaze affects women’s body self perception indexed by measures of body surveillance, shame and dissatisfaction
How did Bernard et al (2012) use the inversion effect to study perceptual processing in sexualised bodies?
Stimuli consisted of 24 men and 24 women (half of each inverted). Neutral face and in a swimsuit- conventionally attractive. ‘Open’ posture conveying sexual nature. Ppts shown two pics after each presentation and asked to identify which one they saw immediately preceding a blank screen. Distractor images were mirror images of target pictures and the percentage of correct identifications were calculated for the 4 conditions.
What did Bernard et al (2015) find in experiment 1 in their inversion effect study replication?
Exp 1: ppts saw all images both inverted and upright rather than half, so any observed differences could be solely attributed to inversion rather than other potential differences. Found ppts better at recognising inverted women
What did Bernard et al (2012) find when measuring the inversion effect to study perceptual processing in sexualised bodies?
Inversion effect for sexualised men but NOT for sexualised women- inverted women better recognised than inverted men, suggesting males and females use CONFIGURAL (BODY) processing when identifying sexualised men but FEATURAL (OBJECT) processing when identifying sexualised women. Therefore women objectified at a perceptual level. They argued this was due to sexual attraction in men but lack of identification in women, although this has been debated.
What did Bernard et al (2015) find in experiment 2A of their inversion effect study replication?
Exp 2a: investigated whether masking women’s sexual body parts by pixelating them would increase configural processing, therefore reducing objectification of women’s bodies- if this was the case then only a main effect of upright versus inverted picture position should emerge. Procedure same as exp 1 but pictures were pixelated- results suggest that salience of sexualised body parts is a key target feature
What did Bernard et al (2015) find in experiment 2B of their inversion effect study replication?
Exp 2b: Examined the possibilities of 2a’s experiments- ppts only saw female bodies and pixelation condition acted as between subjects variable- predicted sexualising body parts would make features less salient producing an inversion effect indicating more configural processing and less sexual objectification of female bodies
What did Bernard et al (2015) find in experiment 3 of their inversion effect study replication?
Exp 3: examined humanisation as a target feature that interfres with the salience of sexual body parts, causing less objectification and more configural processing - specifically, focused on whether providing info about female target’s internal attributes of warmth and competence would reduce perceiver’s ability to objectify women- found that accuracy score of humanised upright women was much higher than any condition- and humanised inverted women was the lowest
What did the first ERP studies looking at face recognition find?
Reported a larger positive potential at the vertex following the presentation of a face stimulus compared to other visual objects
What do most ERP studies examining face and body processing tend to focus on?
The N170- a negative potential peaking at about 170ms after onset of stimuli
What did Hietanen and Nummenmaa find when measuring the N170 effect in sexualised bodies and faces? What notion is this consistent with?
Found that both naked bodies and sexualised bodies evoked and delayed N170s compared to nonsexualised bodies and faces- and this emerged for both male and female targets
Consistent with the notion that target sexualisation is associated with specific cortical processing through larger neural responses including larger N170 amplitudes
What did Bernard et al (2018) measure in their study on target sexualisation and the N170 response?
Non/sexualised bodies and object stimuli e.g. shoes
4 pictures in each block appearing 60 times upright and 60 inverted- ppt asked to indicate whether the image they had just viewed had been upright or inverted to maintain attention. An EEG was used to test this.
What did Bernard et al (2018) find in their study on target sexualisation and the N170 response?
Results on N170 amplitudes found main effects of target gender and target sexualisation- larger for female bodies and larger for sexualised bodies
Significant interaction between target sexualisation and picture position- larger amplitudes for non inverted sexualised bodies compared to upright non sexualised bodies
Larger N170 amplitudes for inverted vs upright non sexualised bodies but no inversion effect found for either sexualised bodies or objects
Presence of interaction between target gender and picture position indicating that the N170 amplitude inversion effect was signif for male but not female bodies- finding could be partly due to differences in perceived sexualisation of non sexualised female vs male bodies
What did Bernard et al (2019) measure and find in Experiment 1 of their three part experiment?
Objective was to examine whether skin to clothing ratio (amountof skin visible) and/or posture suggestiveness caused cognitive objectification of bodies
Findings: main effect of picture position with larger N170 amplitudes for inverted bodies, indicating bodies with both low and high skin to clothing ratio were processed configurable and not objectified
What did Bernard et al (2019) measure and find in Experiment 2 of their three part experiment?
Objective was to examine whether posture suggestiveness causes cognitive objectification
Findings: interactionsbetween skin clothing ratio, posture suggestiveness and picture position were not significant but hypothesis B was supported- suggests posture suggestiveness is the key driver of cognitive objectification
What were the key results from Exp 1 and 2 of Bernard’s 2019 study?
Corroborated notion that skin to skin clothing ratio alone does not cause cog objectification of bodies; high and low skin to clothing ratios were processed configurally (larger N170s for inverted bodies compared to upright) and NOT cognitively objectified. Instead, posture suggestiveness was the key driver of cognitive objectification. Bodies with non suggestive postures were processed configurally and not objectified. In contrast, inverted and upright bodies with suggestive postures triggered similar N170s, evidencing less configural processing and more cognitive objectification. This pattern was the same for male and female targets.
What did Bernard et al (2019) measure and find in Experiment 3 of their three part experiment?
They wanted to further investigate whether cognitive objectification was influenced by body symmetry (easier to mentally rotate asymmetric stimuli). Suggestive postures were more asymmetric than non suggestive postures so cognitive objectification that emerged in exp 2 could be related to this asymmetry. Asymmetrical bodies may require more cog resources to visually process them compared with bodies displaying non suggestive postures.
Method same as exp 2 except targets displaying non suggestive postures were matched in terms of asymmetry with suggestive postures.
Interaction was found between posture suggestiveness and picture position- inverted bodies displaying non suggestive postures were associated with larger N170s compared w upright counterparts. Picture position did NOT modulate the N170 amplitudes associated with bodies displaying suggestive postures- evidencing less configural processing and more cognitive objectification
What do results from Exp 1,2 and 3 in Bernard et al’s (2019) studies show?
Overall, these results evidenced that bodies displaying nonsuggestive postures were processed configurally (as indexed by the significant N170 inversion effect), whereas bodies with suggestive postures were processed less configurally and cognitively objectified (as indexed by the absence of N170 inversion effect). Given bodies displaying suggestive postures are associated with the same asymmetry index as compared with bodies displaying nonsuggestive potures, this indicates that bodies displaying suggestive postures are processed less configurally and objectified because of posture suggestiveness, not because of body asymmetry.
