A commentary on The sexualized-body-inversion hypothesis revisited: Valid indicator of sexual objectification or methodological artifact? by Schmidt, A. F., and Kistemaker, L. M. (2015). Cognition 134, 77-84. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2014.09.003
Recent objectification research found results consistent with the sexualized body-inversion hypothesis (SBIH): People relied on analytic, “object-like” processing when recognizing sexualized female bodies and on configural processing when recognizing sexualized male bodies (Bernard et al., 2012). Specifically, Bernard et al. (2012) showed that perceivers were better at recognizing sexualized male bodies when the bodies were presented upright than upside down, whereas this pattern did not emerge for sexualized female bodies; thus, male bodies were recognized configurally similar to other human stimuli whereas female bodies were recognized analytically, similarly to most objects (see Kostic, 2013 for an exact replication). Based on two studies, Schmidt and Kistemaker (2015) concluded that Bernard et al. (2012)\u27s findings were: (i) due to a symmetry confound; (ii) not due to target\u27s sexualization. This commentary challenges these conclusions
