Women See Bodies; Men See Body Parts

Yet another research study of gender differences shows some fascinating variation in the way men and women see and process their perceptions of others. Men tend to be perceived as a whole, women, on the other hand, are more likely to be perceived as parts.

[div class=attrib]From Scientific American:[end-div]

A glimpse at the magazine rack in any supermarket checkout line will tell you that women are frequently the focus of sexual objectification. Now, new research finds that the brain actually processes images of women differently than those of men, contributing to this trend.

Women are more likely to be picked apart by the brain and seen as parts rather than a whole, according to research published online June 29 in the European Journal of Social Psychology. Men, on the other hand, are processed as a whole rather than the sum of their parts.

“Everyday, ordinary women are being reduced to their sexual body parts,” said study author Sarah Gervais, a psychologist at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. “This isn’t just something that supermodels or porn stars have to deal with.”

Objectification hurts
Numerous studies have found that feeling objectified is bad for women. Being ogled can make women do worse on math tests, and self-sexualization, or scrutiny of one’s own shape, is linked to body shame, eating disorders and poor mood.

But those findings have all focused on the perception of being sexualized or objectified, Gervais told LiveScience. She and her colleagues wondered about the eye of the beholder: Are people really objectifying women more than men?

To find out, the researchers focused on two types of mental processing, global and local. Global processing is how the brain identifies objects as a whole. It tends to be used when recognizing people, where it’s not just important to know the shape of the nose, for example, but also how the nose sits in relation to the eyes and mouth. Local processing focuses more on the individual parts of an object. You might recognize a house by its door alone, for instance, while you’re less likely to recognize a person’s arm without the benefit of seeing the rest of their body.

If women are sexually objectified, people should process their bodies in a more local way, focusing on individual body parts like breasts. To test the idea, Gervais and her colleagues carried out two nearly identical experiments with a total of 227 undergraduate participants. Each person was shown non-sexualized photographs, each of either a young man or young woman, 48 in total. After seeing each original full-body image, the participants saw two side-by-side photographs. One was the original image, while the other was the original with a slight alteration to the chest or waist (chosen because these are sexualized body parts). Participants had to pick which image they’d seen before.

In some cases, the second set of photos zoomed in on the chest or waist only, asking participants to pick the body part they’d seen previously versus the one that had been altered.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article following the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image: People focus on the parts of a woman’s body when processing her image, according to research published in June in the European Journal of Social Psychology. Courtesy of LiveScience / Yuri Arcurs, Shutterstock.[end-div]