The role of the head in configural body processing: Behavioural and electrophysiological evidence from the inversion and scrambling effect

The Somatomorphic Matrix-Female: More evidence for the validity of bidimensional figural rating scales for women

Our study aimed to develop and provide a preliminary psychometric validation of the Somatomorphic Matrix-Female (SM-F), a new bidimensional female figural rating scale which can be used to gauge actual and desired levels of both body fat and muscularity in a consolidated measure, as well as providing an index of actual-desired body discrepancy based on these measures. Across two studies undergraduate women (n Study 1 = 481; n Study 2 = 391) completed the Eating Disorder Examination-Questionnaire, the Body Shape Questionnaire-34, and the Depression Anxiety Stress Scales-21 (Study 1) and the Drive for Thinness Scale and the Drive for Muscularity Scale (Study 2), as well as the SM-F. Overall, the SM-F demonstrated sound content, concurrent, and convergent validity for actual and desired body fat, actual and desired muscularity, and their respective discrepancy scores.

A multilevel Bayesian meta-analysis of the body inversion effect: Evaluating controversies over headless and sexualized bodies

Face and body perception rely on specialized processing mechanisms to interpret social information efficiently. The body inversion effect (BIE), refers to an inversion effect for bodies, such that recognition of bodies is impaired by inversion. The BIE, like the face inversion effect (FIE), is particularly important because a disproportionate BIE relative to inversion effects for objects could be interpreted in much the same way as the disproportionate FIE has often been characterized; that is, as evidence of specialized, configural processing. However, research supporting the BIE is marked by methodological heterogeneity and mixed findings. Our multilevel Bayesian meta-analysis addresses inconsistencies in the literature by pooling data from numerous studies to estimate the magnitude of the BIE across various methodological and stimulus properties. We included 180 effect sizes from 41 empirical articles representing data from 2,274 participants. Overall, we found that the BIE was moderate-large in magnitude (Hedges' g = 0.75). Importantly, the inversion effect was larger for bodies than objects (b = 0.42); however, the inversion effect for faces was larger than for bodies (b = 0.34). We tested the role of discrimination dimension, stimulus type, face/head inclusion, stimulus sexualization, and sexualized stimulus sex as moderators of the BIE. We found that the BIE was moderated by discrimination dimension, stimulus type, stimulus sexualization, and sexualized stimulus sex. By synthesizing the existing literature, we provide a better theoretical understanding of how underlying visual processing mechanisms may differ for different types of social information (i.e., bodies vs. faces).

Look up to the body: An eye-tracking investigation of 7-months-old infants' visual exploration of emotional body expressions

The human body is an important source of information to infer a person's emotional state. Research with adult observers indicate that the posture of the torso, arms and hands provide important perceptual cues for recognising anger, fear and happy expressions. Much less is known about whether infants process body regions differently for different body expressions. To address this issue, we used eye tracking to investigate whether infants' visual exploration patterns differed when viewing body expressions. Forty-eight 7-months-old infants were randomly presented with static images of adult female bodies expressing anger, fear and happiness, as well as an emotionally-neutral posture. Facial cues to emotional state were removed by masking the faces. We measured the proportion of looking time, proportion and number of fixations, and duration of fixations on the head, upper body and lower body regions for the different expressions. We showed that infants explored the upper body more than the lower body. Importantly, infants at this age fixated differently on different body regions depending on the expression of the body posture. In particular, infants spent a larger proportion of their looking times and had longer fixation durations on the upper body for fear relative to the other expressions. These results extend and replicate the information about infant processing of emotional expressions displayed by human bodies, and they support the hypothesis that infants' visual exploration of human bodies is driven by the upper body.