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Body Image Concern (BIC)

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Chapter 1: Introduction Body image refers to the collection of beliefs, feelings and perceptions that an individual has about their physical appearance, and is a significant predictor of one’s physical and mental health (Gillen, 2015). Body image concern (BIC) is so pervasive that it is often referred to as a ‘normative discontent’ among both women and men (Tantleff-Dunn, Barnes, & Larose, 2011). It exists along a continuum, with higher levels indicating an unhealthy, clinically significant preoccupation with perceived or minor physical flaws, which is characteristic of Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD; Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th ed., DSM-5, American Psychological Association, 2013). The severity of discontent, …show more content…

It is thought that these apparent abnormalities produce an imbalance between global and local processing, such that individuals with this disorder are orientated toward the local features of an image or object at the expense of more global representations. In other words, it has been proposed that a local visual processing bias may be present in this disorder. Brain imaging studies have found that, compared with healthy controls, BDD patients display hyperactivity in the left hemisphere, particularly in the frontal, temporal and parietal regions (Feusner et al, 2007, 2011). The left hemisphere is an area known to be involved in the processing of details (Gazzaniga, 2000; Love, Rouder, & Wisniewski, 1999; Bradshaw et al. 1976), while the right hemisphere, which was employed more by healthy controls, is believed to be heavily involved in global, holistic processing (Evans et al. 2000). These results suggest that BDD patients rely more on detailed processing, which is reflected in their preferential use of the left hemisphere. Recent behavioural evidence is beginning to converge with the findings from these brain imaging studies. For example, BDD patients demonstrated a preference towards the minute details of a complex figure when asked to copy the figure from memory, as in the Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure Test (Deckerbach et al., 2000). In …show more content…

For healthy controls, rotating a stimulus 180 typically results in slower and less accurate responses compared to upright stimulus presentations (Reed, Stone, Bozova, & Tanaka, 2003). This effect is especially pronounced for faces and bodies, compared to other stimuli such as houses and landscapes (Diamond & Carey, 1986; Reed et al., 2003; Yin, 1969).For example, face inversion typically results in a 20 to 30 per cent decrease in recognition accuracy compared to upright faces. However, inverting other non-face stimuli usually only produces an accuracy detriment of 0 to 10 per cent (Carey,

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