The development of a body comparison measure: the CoSS

Purpose This study reports on the development and validation of a brief and widely applicable measure of body comparison (the Comparison of Self-Scale—CoSS), which is a maintaining feature of eating disorders. Methods A sample of 412 adults completed the CoSS, an existing measure of aspects of body comparison, and eating pathology and associated states. Test–retest reliability was examined over 2 weeks. Results Exploratory factor analysis showed that 22 CoSS items loaded onto two factors, resulting in two scales—Appearance Comparison and Social Comparison—with strong internal consistency and test–retest reliability. Conclusions In clinical terms, the CoSS was superior to the existing measure of body comparison in accounting for depression and anxiety. Given that it is a relatively brief measure, the CoSS could be useful in the routine assessment of body comparison, and in formulating and treating individuals with body image concerns. However, the measure awaits full clinical validation

Automatic evaluation of body-related words among young women: an experimental study

Background: Sociocultural models of body image disturbance have linked the development of body dissatisfaction and eating disorders to exposure to media messages depicting the unrealistically slender female physique. Previous research has demonstrated that exposure to images depicting the thin female ideal has negative effects on some females’ levels of body dissatisfaction. Much of this research, however, has utilised relatively long stimulus exposure times; thereby focusing on effortful and conscious processing of body-related stimuli. Relatively little is known about the nature of females’ affective responses to the textual components of body-related stimuli, especially when these stimuli are only briefly encountered. The primary aim of the current research was to determine whether young women automatically evaluate body-related words and whether these responses are associated with body image concerns, including self-reported levels of appearance schematicity, thin internalisation, body dissatisfaction, and dietary restraint. Methods: An affective priming task was used to investigate whether females automatically evaluate body-related words, and whether this is associated with self-reported body image concerns. In a within-participants experimental design, the valence congruence of the prime and target pairs was manipulated. Participants selected body words as primes in Experiment 1 (N = 27), while normatively selected body words were primes in Experiment 2 (N = 50). Each prime was presented briefly, followed by a target word which participants judged as “good” or “bad”. The dependent variable was response latency to the target. Results: Automatic evaluation was evident: responding to congruent pairs was faster than responding to incongruent pairs. Body image concerns were unrelated to automaticity. Conclusions: The findings suggest that brief encounters with body words are likely to prompt automatic evaluation in all young women, and that this process proceeds unintentionally and efficiently, without conscious guidance. The potential implications for higher order, conscious information processing is discussed

Distinct contributions of extrastriate body area and temporoparietal junction in perceiving one's own and others' body.

The right temporoparietal cortex plays a critical role in body representation. Here, we applied repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) over right extrastriate body area (EBA) and temporoparietal junction (TPJ) to investigate their causative roles in perceptual representations of one's own and others' body. Healthy women adjusted size-distorted pictures of their own body or of the body of another person according to how they perceived the body (subjective task) or how others perceived it (intersubjective task). In keeping with previous reports, at baseline, we found an overall underestimation of body size. Crucially, EBA-rTMS increased the underestimation bias when participants adjusted the images according to how others perceived their own or the other woman's body, suggesting a specific role of EBA in allocentric body representations. Conversely, TPJ-rTMS increased the underestimation bias when participants adjusted the body of another person, either a familiar other or a close friend, in both subjective and intersubjective tasks, suggesting an involvement of TPJ in representing others' bodies. These effects were body-specific, since no TMS-induced modulation was observed when participants judged a familiar object. The results suggest that right EBA and TPJ play active and complementary roles in the complex interaction between the perceptions of one's own and other people's body