title: Body conscious? Interoceptive awareness, measured by heartbeat perception, is negatively correlated with self-objectification.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  'Self-objectification' is the tendency to experience one's body principally as an object, to be evaluated for its appearance rather than for its effectiveness. Within objectification theory, it has been proposed that self-objectification accounts for the poorer interoceptive awareness observed in women, as measured by heartbeat perception. Our study is, we believe, the first specifically to test this relationship.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Using a well-validated and reliable heartbeat perception task, we measured interoceptive awareness in women and compared this with their scores on the Self-Objectification Questionnaire, the Self-Consciousness Scale and the Body Consciousness Questionnaire. Interoceptive awareness was negatively correlated with self-objectification. Interoceptive awareness, public body consciousness and private body consciousness together explained 31% of the variance in self-objectification. However, private body consciousness was not significantly correlated with interoceptive awareness, which may explain the many nonsignificant results in self-objectification studies that have used private body consciousness as a measure of body awareness.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  We propose interoceptive awareness, assessed by heartbeat perception, as a measure of body awareness in self-objectification studies. Our findings have implications for those clinical conditions, in women, which are characterised by self-objectification and low interoceptive awareness, such as eating disorders.
authors: Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway University of London, United Kingdom. Vivien.Ainley.2008@live.rhul.ac.uk
authors: Vivien
authors: V
authors: Ainley
authors: Manos
authors: M
authors: Tsakiris
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001364:Awareness / Q000502:physiology*; D001828:Body Image / Q000523:psychology*; D003243:Consciousness; D005260:Female; D006339:Heart Rate / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D010465:Perception; D012649:Self Concept; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D055815:Young Adult