The role of fragrance and self-esteem in perception of body odors and impressions of others
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Croijmans I
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8592444 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:The present studies investigated whether similarity to the self influenced memory for impressions of others. We predicted that similarity to the self would facilitate impression memory for others, paralleling the self-reference effect found when information is processed relative to the self. We were interested in how the initial valence of the impression, whether positive or negative, affected impression memory. Across two experiments, participants formed impressions while viewing faces paired with traits and behaviors. After recognition, participants rated the self-descriptiveness of the studied traits allowing impression memory to be sorted into high-, medium-, and low-self-similarity. For positive impressions, similar others were remembered better than dissimilar others. For negative impressions, similar others were remembered more poorly than dissimilar others. These results illustrate that similarity to the self has multifaceted effects on person memory, leading to memory enhancement in the case of people given positive impressions, but reducing memory for people associated with negative impressions.
| S-EPMC5603311 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BACKGROUND:Whether individuals with anorexia nervosa (AN) are able to accurately perceive emotions from faces of others is unclear. Furthermore, whether individuals with AN process images of their own face differently to healthy individuals has thus far not been investigated. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate facial affect processing and the processing of one's own face through measures of emotion identification, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and eyetracking. METHODS:Twenty-four females with AN and 25 matched healthy control participants were presented with an implicit emotion processing task during fMRI and eyetracking, followed by an explicit emotion identification task. RESULTS:The AN group were found to 'hyperscan' stimuli and avoided visually attending to salient features of their own face images. RESULTS of the fMRI revealed increased activity to own face stimuli in AN in the right inferior and middle temporal gyri, and right lingual gyrus. AN participants were not found to display emotion identification deficits to the standard emotional face stimuli. DISCUSSION:The findings are discussed in terms of increased anxiety to disorder-relevant stimuli in AN. Potential clinical implications are discussed in relation to the use of eyetracking techniques to improve the perception of self in AN.
| S-EPMC4530666 | biostudies-literature
Project description:ObjectivesSimilarity to the self has been shown to affect memory for impressions in younger adults, suggesting a self-reference effect in person memory. Because older adults show comparable self-reference effects, but prioritize memory for positive over negative information relative to young adults, we examined age differences in self-similarity effects on memory for positive and negative impressions.MethodYounger and older adults formed positive and negative impressions of others differing in the degree of similarity to the self (high, medium, low).ResultsFor positive impressions, both groups showed enhanced memory for self-similar others relative to dissimilar others, whereas for negative impressions, memory was poorer for those similar to the self. When collapsed across similarity to the self, younger adults remembered negative impressions better than older adults, but interestingly, older adults exhibited a trend for better memory for the positive impressions.DiscussionResults suggest that self-reference effects in impression memory are preserved with age and that older adults exhibit positivity effects in person memory consistent with previous findings.
| S-EPMC4553711 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Our natural body odor goes through several stages of age-dependent changes in chemical composition as we grow older. Similar changes have been reported for several animal species and are thought to facilitate age discrimination of an individual based on body odors, alone. We sought to determine whether humans are able to discriminate between body odor of humans of different ages. Body odors were sampled from three distinct age groups: Young (20-30 years old), Middle-age (45-55), and Old-age (75-95) individuals. Perceptual ratings and age discrimination performance were assessed in 41 young participants. There were significant differences in ratings of both intensity and pleasantness, where body odors from the Old-age group were rated as less intense and less unpleasant than body odors originating from Young and Middle-age donors. Participants were able to discriminate between age categories, with body odor from Old-age donors mediating the effect also after removing variance explained by intensity differences. Similarly, participants were able to correctly assign age labels to body odors originating from Old-age donors but not to body odors originating from other age groups. This experiment suggests that, akin to other animals, humans are able to discriminate age based on body odor alone and that this effect is mediated mainly by body odors emitted by individuals of old age.
| S-EPMC3364187 | biostudies-other
Project description:Although low self-esteem and body disinvestment have been recognized as potential risk factors for disordered eating, no studies have explored how these factors may work together to predict binge eating in adolescents. Therefore, we hypothesized a path model for girls and boys separately to investigate whether the body's investment dimensions (feelings towards the body, physical touch, body care, body protection) mediate the relationship between self-esteem and binge eating, and age moderate such relationships. Participants were 1046 Italian students aged between 11 and 19 years (472 girls, Mage = 14.17; 574 boys, Mage = 14.60) screened through self-report measures. Both models showed an acceptable fit (males: χ2(22) = 30.441; RMSEA = 0.026; CFI = 0.99; TLI = 0.97; SRMR = 0.023; females: χ2(22) = 34.723; RMSEA = 0.35; CFI = 0.98; TLI = 0.95; SRMR = 0.029). Negative body feelings and reduced body protection fully mediated the relationship between self-esteem and binge eating, regardless of gender. Our findings highlight the importance of interventions promoting body emotional investment to reduce adolescents' vulnerability to binge eating.
| S-EPMC8304970 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundLimb amputation is often an inevitable procedure in the advanced condition of various diseases and poses a dramatic impact on a patient's life. The aim of the present study is to analyze the impact of lower-limb amputations on aesthetic factors such as body image and self-esteem as well as quality of life (QoL).Methods298 patients (149 uni- or bilateral lower-limb amputees and 149 controls) were included in this cross-sectional study in three centers. Demographic data was collected and patients received a 118-item questionnaire including the Multidimensional Body-Self Relations Questionnaire (MBSRQ), the Rosenberg Self-esteem (RSE) scale and the SF-36 Health Survey (QoL). ANOVA and student's t-test were used for statistical analysis.ResultsUnilateral lower-limb amputees showed a significant lower MBSRQ score of 3.07±0.54 compared with 3.41±0.34 in controls (p<0.001) and a lower score in the RSE compared to controls (21.63±4.72 vs. 21.46±5.86). However, differences were not statistically significant (p = 0.36). Patients with phantom pain sensation had a significantly reduced RSE (p = 0.01). The SF-36 health survey was significantly lower in patients with lower-limb amputation compared to controls (42.17±14.47 vs. 64.05±12.39) (p<0.001).ConclusionThis study showed that lower-limb amputations significantly influence patients' body image and QoL. Self-esteem seems to be an independent aspect, which is not affected by lower-limb amputation. However, self-esteem is influenced significantly by phantom pain sensation.
| S-EPMC3963966 | biostudies-literature
Project description:ObjectiveBody dysmorphic disorder (BDD) is associated with low self-esteem. The aim of this meta-analysis was to examine the strength of the cross-sectional relationship between BDD symptom severity and global self-esteem in individuals with BDD, mentally healthy controls, community or student samples, and cosmetic surgery patients. Moreover, the role of depressive symptom severity in this relationship and other moderating factors were investigated.MethodsA keyword-based literature search was performed to identify studies in which BDD symptoms and global self-esteem were assessed. Random effects meta-analysis of Fisher's z-transformed correlations and partial correlations controlling for the influence of depressive symptom severity was conducted. In addition to meta-analysis of the observed effects, we corrected the individual correlations for variance restrictions to address varying ranges of BDD symptom severity across samples.ResultsTwenty-five studies with a total of 6278 participants were included. A moderately negative relationship between BDD symptom severity and global self-esteem was found (r = -.42, CI = [-.48, -.35] for uncorrected correlations, r = -.45, CI = [-.51, -.39] for artifact-corrected correlations). A meta-analysis of partial correlations revealed that depressive symptom severity could partly account for the aforementioned relationship (pr = -.20, CI = [-.25, -.15] for uncorrected partial correlations, pr = -.23, CI = [-.28, -.17] for artifact-corrected partial correlations). The sample type (e.g., individuals with BDD, mentally healthy controls, or community samples) and diagnosis of BDD appeared to moderate the relationship only before artifact correction of effect sizes, whereas all moderators were non-significant in the meta-analysis of artifact-corrected correlations.ConclusionsThe findings demonstrate that low self-esteem is an important hallmark of BDD beyond the influence of depressive symptoms. It appears that negative evaluation in BDD is not limited to appearance but also extends to other domains of the self. Altogether, our findings emphasize the importance of addressing self-esteem and corresponding core beliefs in prevention and treatment of BDD.
| S-EPMC8207567 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Self-orientation perception is a necessary ability for everyday life that heavily depends on visual and vestibular information. To perceive the orientation of oneself with respect to the external environment would seem to first require that one has a clear sense of one's own body ('sense of body ownership'). However, the experimental evidence for this is sparse. Therefore, the aim of the present study was to investigate how the sense of body ownership affects perceived self-orientation. We combined a self-orientation illusion - where the visual scene, i.e., a fully furnished room, was rotated slowly around the roll axis - with a full-body ownership illusion paradigm - where the ownership of a stranger's body seen from the first-person perspective in the center of the scene was manipulated by synchronous (illusion) or asynchronous (control) visual-tactile stimulation. Participants were asked to judge the appearance of shaded disk stimuli (a shape-from-shading test), which are perceived as three-dimensional (3D) spheres; this perception depends on perceived self-orientation. Illusory body ownership influenced self-orientation as reported subjectively in questionnaires and as evident from the objective shape-from-shading test data. Thus, body ownership determines self-orientation perception, presumably by boosting the weighting of visual cues over the gravitational forces detected by the vestibular system.
| S-EPMC6207657 | biostudies-literature
Project description:It is still not well understood how and why developmental trajectories of self-esteem change, particularly in late life. We investigated the role of resources for self-esteem change across adulthood. In detail, we explored between-person differences in self-esteem levels and change in relation to resources with participants who ranged in age from 17 to 100 years. Study 1 consisted of a cross-sectional representative German sample of 12,609 participants, where we observed few age differences in mean levels of self-esteem across adulthood. Being married or in a relationship and positive subjective health were associated with higher levels of self-esteem. In addition, relations of resources of subjective health as well as neuroticism with self-esteem appeared to be smaller in late compared to young adulthood. Longitudinal studies including young (N = 338) and older adults (N = 325) indicated both reasonably high stability regarding rank-order and mean levels of self-esteem across 4 and 8 years. Again, age-differential resources appeared to be important for higher levels of self-esteem with education being related to self-esteem in young adults and subjective health in late life. However, no resource was associated with changes in self-esteem in either young or late adulthood. Overall, findings suggest that self-esteem levels are reflective of age-specific constraints and risks.
| S-EPMC5549149 | biostudies-other
Project description:People make judgments of others based on appearance, and these inferences can affect social interactions. Although the importance of facial appearance in these judgments is well established, the impact of the body morphology remains unclear. Specifically, it is unknown whether experimentally varied body morphology has an impact on perception of threat in others. In two preregistered experiments (N = 250), participants made judgments of perceived threat of body stimuli of varying morphology, both in the absence (Experiment 1) and presence (Experiment 2) of facial information. Bodies were perceived as more threatening as they increased in mass with added musculature and portliness, and less threatening as they increased in emaciation. The impact of musculature endured even in the presence of faces, although faces contributed more to the overall threat judgment. The relative contributions of the faces and bodies seemed to be driven by discordance, such that threatening faces exerted the most influence when paired with non-threatening bodies, and vice versa. This suggests that the faces and bodies were not perceived as entirely independent and separate components. Overall, these findings suggest that body morphology plays an important role in perceived threat and may bias real-world judgments.
| S-EPMC8031394 | biostudies-literature