First Study Of Its Kind Finds Healthy People Have A Distorted Sense Of Their Body Volume And Length

via Sadibolova et al, 2019 By Christian Jarrett How accurately or not we are able to judge the size of our own bodies and specific body parts is an important topic in clinical psychology because a distorted body image is thought to play part in eating disorders, body dysmorphia and other related conditions. However, research has until now been limited in always involving one- or two-dimensional judgments, with volunteers asked to estimated the length of various body parts, for instance, or asked to judge which of various 2-dimensional visual depictions of their body is most accurate. In reality, of course, we don’t just have a sense of how our body looks in two dimensions from the outside but also how it feels from the inside, including how much space it occupies. A new study published in Cortex is the first to examine how accurately people of healthy weight can estimate the volume of their entire body and specific body parts. Renata Sadibolova at Goldsmiths, University of London, and her colleagues write that “these findings … highlight the importance of studying the perceptual distortions ‘at the baseline’, i.e., in healthy population, given their potential to further elucidate the nature of perceptual distortions in clinical conditions.” The researchers recruited 40 young men and women (average BMI 24) and asked them to wear a black smock to cover their bodies and to sit at a table. Here they were challenged to judge their bodies in one...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Perception Source Type: blogs