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.
