Abstract
The human body conveys socially relevant information, including a person’s gender. Several studies have shown that both shape and motion inform gender judgments of bodies. However, while body shape seems to influence more the judgment of female bodies, body motion seems to play a major role in the judgments of male bodies. Yet, the interdependence of morphologic and dynamic cues in shaping gender judgment and attractiveness evaluation in body perception is still unclear. In two experiments, we investigated how variations of implied motion and shape interact in perceptual and affective judgments of female and male bodies. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to provide ratings for masculinity and femininity of virtual renderings of human bodies with variable gender-typing features and implied motion. We found evidence of a tendency to perceive bodies in static poses as more feminine and bodies in dynamic poses as more masculine. In Experiment 2, participants rated the same pictures for dynamism and pleasantness. We found that male bodies were judged more dynamic than female bodies with the same pose. Also, female bodies were liked more in static than in dynamic poses. A mediation analysis allowed us to further shed light on the relationship between gender-typing features and motion, suggesting that the less is the movement conveyed by a female body, the greater is an observer’s sensitivity to its femininity, and this leads to a more positive evaluation of its pleasantness. Our findings hint to an association between stillness and femininity in body perception, which can stem from either the evolutionary meaning of sexual selection and/or the influence of cultural norms.
Highlights
Gender is one of the most significant constructs in human social organization
Tukey post-hoc tests [mean square error (MSE) = 0.06525, df = 29] showed that femininity judgments continuously increased from the 90% male stimuli, which were judged as the least feminine bodies, to the 90%
The 60% static female stimuli received comparable feminine judgments than the 90% dynamic ones (p = 0.289), suggesting that a static posture increased the feminine judgments of a lowtypical body up to the level of a dynamic typical female body
Summary
Gender is one of the most significant constructs in human social organization. Humans can rapidly differentiate between male and female conspecifics, relying on a heightened sensitivity to the biological commonalities that make an individual a male or a female. Even when primary sex characteristics are not visible, other morphological features of the body can mark sexual dimorphism Among these features, the waist-to-hip ratio (WHR), Motion and Gender-Typing Body Features which is the circumference of the waist relative to the hips, is considered an important body cue to accurately discriminate men from women (Lippa, 1983; Johnson, 2004; Johnson et al, 2012). After puberty, women accumulate more fat on the hips than men and, over the years, the similarity in WHR between boys and girls decreases (Singh, 1993) Another sexually dimorphic feature is the shoulder-to-hip ratio (SHR), which is the circumference of the shoulders relative to the hips, which tends to be higher in men than in women (Hugill et al, 2011). Eye-tracking studies have shown that, while men spend more time examining the waist area of women’s bodies, women focus their attention on the upper body of men (Dixson et al, 2011, 2014), suggesting that the use of WHR and SHR might be more important for evaluating female and male bodies, respectively
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