Response: Commentary "The sexualized-body-inversion hypothesis revisited: Valid indicator of sexual objectification or methodological artifact?".

Abstract

Recently, Bernard et al. (2012) reported that a mirror task produced no differences for recognition rates of sexualized female stimuli that had been presented in upright vs. upside down orientations (based on acceptance of the null-hypothesis) whereas recognition rates for sexualized males were better in upright vs. upside down presentations. According to their sexualized-body-inversion hypothesis (SBIH) the authors concluded that male stimuli were processed configurally (i.e., person perception, amenable to stimulus presentation orientation) as opposed to female stimuli being perceived analytically (i.e., object perception, unimpaired by presentation mode). This research has been critized (Tarr, 2013; Schmidt and Kistemaker, 2015). Empirically, we have shown greater asymmetry in female vs. male stimuli to explain the original pattern of results. Utilizing the same design and stimuli subsets from Bernard et al. (2012) we replicated their results but replication failed with stricter experimental control (counterbalancing of the original stimulus subsets) and with a newly developed symmetry-matched stimuli set (Schmidt and Kistemaker, 2015). We concluded that the original effect was dependent on two important boundary conditions in a task vulnerable to symmetry confounds between a) male and female stimuli and b) different stimulus subsets. This interpretation has been challenged (Bernard et al., 2015a).