Abstract
A mismatch exists between people’s mental representations of their own body and their real body measurements, which may impact general well-being and health. We investigated whether this mismatch is reduced when contextualizing body size estimation in a real-life scenario. Using a reverse correlation paradigm, we constructed unbiased, data-driven visual depictions of participants’ implicit body representations. Across three conditions—own abstract, ideal, and own concrete body—participants selected the body that looked most like their own, like the body they would like to have, or like the body they would use for online shopping. In the own concrete condition only, we found a significant correlation between perceived and real hip width, suggesting that the perceived/real body match only exists when body size estimation takes place in a practical context, although the negative correlation indicated inaccurate estimation. Further, participants who underestimated their body size or who had more negative attitudes towards their body weight showed a positive correlation between perceived and real body size in the own abstract condition. Finally, our results indicated that different body areas were implicated in the different conditions. These findings suggest that implicit body representations depend on situational and individual differences, which has clinical and practical implications.
Highlights
A mismatch exists between people’s mental representations of their own body and their real body measurements, which may impact general well-being and health
Our results suggest that this trend of overestimation for people with smaller bodies and underestimation for people with larger bodies is observed in a student sample for implicit body size estimation, but only when this estimation is linked to a real-life context
We explored the relationship between real and perceived body size when asked about one’s own abstract, ideal, and own concrete body using visual depictions of implicit body representations by means of a data-driven method
Summary
A mismatch exists between people’s mental representations of their own body and their real body measurements, which may impact general well-being and health. No correlations were observed between perceived hip width of these CIs and the real hip widths of participants ( results indicated that visual body representations of participants with negative attitudes towards their bodies showed wider hip widths than those of participants with more positive attitudes), suggesting that no relationship exists between people’s real body size and an offline, pictorial representation of their b ody[26] These findings, using the reverse correlation technique for the first time to depict implicit and offline selfrepresentations in an unbiased and pictorial manner, are in line with previous research indicating that body size estimates are more reflective of attitudes towards one’s own body rather than real body size[35] (but see36), and various studies showing that a mismatch exists between own and perceived body s ize[1,2,4,7,8,37,38,39,40,41,42,43] (but s ee[44]). The question remains whether the same is true when offline body representations are accessed implicitly
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