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.

摘要

先前的发现表明，仅在女性中，右半球对身体图像失真的贡献较大。在这里，我们着手重复这一发现并研究身体图像的性别是否会在这种偏侧化中起作用。我们在这里报告了使用分割视野方法进行的两个人体尺寸估算实验。在实验1中，我们发现视野，参与者性别和身体图像性别没有影响。我们讨论了类似雌雄同体刺激物的结果。在实验2中，我们增加了人体图像刺激的二态性。令人惊讶的是，我们观察到了不同的模式。男性和女性都高估了在两个视野中呈现的女性模型的大小，但是相比于在右侧视野中呈现的图像，男性模型的大小被低估了。我们发现男人和女人之间没有差异。我们的结果表明，在先前的研究中观察到的男性和女性在身体图像变形方面的差异可以归因于身体图像的性别。据我们所知，这是第一项显示身体图像的性别调节偏侧化和身体图像失真的研究。