The sex of body images modulates size estimations and lateralized responses in body perception

ABSTRACT

Previous findings suggest a right hemispheric contribution to body image distortions only in women. Here we set out to replicate this finding and investigate whether the sex of the body image would play a role in this lateralization. We report here two experiments of body size estimation using the divided visual field methodology. In Experiment 1 we found no effect of visual field, participant sex, and body image sex. We discuss the results in terms of the androgynous-like stimuli appearance. In Experiment 2 we increased the dimorphism of body image stimuli. Surprisingly, we observed a different pattern. Both men and women overestimated the size of female models presented in both visual fields, but the size of male models was underestimated for presentations in the left visual field compared to presentations in the right visual field. We found no differences between men and women. Our results suggest that the differences in lateralization of body image distortions between men and women observed in previous studies can be attributed to the sex of the body image. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to show that the sex of the body image modulates lateralization and body image distortion.

KEYWORDS:

• Body image
• visual perception
• hemispheric specialization
• body perception
• psychophysics

Acknowledgement

We thank our reviewer, Dr. Christine Mohr, for her valuable feedback and our colleague, Dr. Bruno Marinho de Sousa, who provided insight and expertise that assisted in the early stages of this research. We have no conflict of interest to disclose.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Full analyses of all statistical tests along with the original data are provided in the Open Science Framework website as supplemental material. The web addresses to these materials are provided in footnotes throughout the manuscript. The data for all experiments are available at https://osf.io/gm9z4/?view_only=0a35055f9b5a45718922515f4ec25fa8.

Notes

1 We performed the sample size calculation and power analysis using PANGEA webpage (Westfall, 2016). The power analysis can be accessed via the open science framework website at https://osf.io/gd7z5/?view_only=0a35055f9b5a45718922515f4ec25fa8.

2 For more details, we provide a full analysis in the Open Science Framework website at https://osf.io/4yq3f/?view_only=0a35055f9b5a45718922515f4ec25fa8.

3 Even though we report here main effects for the sake of completeness, we were mostly not interested in the main effects. Therefore we consider that our analysis focusses on only four tests, the three 2-way interactions, and the single 3-way interaction. For that reason consider an alpha level of 0.0125 (Bonferroni correction) for error control in the ANOVA test (Cramer et al., 2016). The p-values reported here are raw ANOVA outputs, therefore not corrected for multiple comparisons.

4 This main effect is not considered significant if we use the corrected alpha level of .0125 (see footnote 3).

5 We provide a full analysis with all effect sizes at the Open Science Framework website at https://osf.io/m7p3z/?view_only=0a35055f9b5a45718922515f4ec25fa8.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq). This study was also financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - Brasil (CAPES) - Finance Code 001.