Archive for April 2015

ECG Analysis | Body Dissatisfaction in University Attending Women

Weight and body shape issues are a major concern amongst today’s general population, especially young women. The pressure from outside forces to conform to a certain body type, whether it is from advertisements or even their own social media pages, is ever present. This causes a lot of women to harbor a high level of body dissatisfaction which then internalizes aforementioned body shape pressures. Mirror exposure has been used recently as a therapeutic technique to reduce body dissatisfaction. Little is known, however, about what actually makes this technique effective. 
A recent study entitled “Body Dissatisfaction and Mirror Exposure: Evidence for a Dissociation between Self-Report and Physiological Responses in Highly Body-Dissatisfied Women” sought to study the cognitive, mental and psychophysiological responses in women with different levels of body dissatisfaction. Forty-two women attending University of Jaen were chosen to participate in the study. The subjects were separated in to two groups, based on self-reported criteria, into either the high-body dissatisfaction (HBD) or low-body dissatisfaction (LBD) group. The participants were then asked to stand in front of a mirror and directed to look at certain parts of their body (while wearing beige underwear) while a BIOPAC MP150 system with an ECG amplifier continuously recorded their physiological signals throughout the experiment. The researchers then used AcqKnowledge software’s ECG analysis functions to obtain quantification of heart rate (HR) values. As hypothesized, HBD women experienced more negative cognitive and mental emotions than did LBD women. Conversely though, HBD women were found to have a reduced physiological reaction (HR) than did LBD. The researchers hypothesized that this might be due to HBD women’s development of a passive coping mechanism. Rather than reacting with heightened senses to an upsetting or fearful situation, HBD women react passively out of a possible sense of helplessness. Researchers also felt that this could possibly be caused by HBD women performing more self-inspections in the mirror than LBD women, but that the other explanation was more probably. Although more research needs to be done, this study suggests the possibility that eating behavior problems could stem from passive coping mechanisms associated with body issues.

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