What we think of as "normal" body shape is affected by what we're accustomed to - the range of body shapes we see. My new research with colleagues shows that this is true for young children as well as adults.
Author
- Lynda Boothroyd
Professor in Psychology, Durham University
Research with adults and with children as young as five has already found that our understanding of what a face looks like is always being updated based on the faces we see around us, from childhood through adulthood.
This process of the brain flexibly changing in response to new repeated inputs is known as "adaptation". When the brain adapts to the same input repeatedly, we can see long term changes in perceptions. For instance, viewing a series of images with larger (as opposed to contracted) facial features leads to an increased preference for large features afterwards.
But so far, research like this on how we view bodies has almost entirely been run with adults.
Among adults, we can see the same effects with body weight that we see with face shape in adults and children. If we are shown a lot of heavy bodies, the bodies we rate as attractive get heavier, the bodies we rate as "normal" get heavier, and the point at which we perceive a body being heavy or not shifts lower. And the opposite happens when we view a lot of thin bodies.
Altered perceptions
Our study tested whether this also holds true for children . Children aged seven to 15 years of age and adult undergraduate students completed the same experimental study. They rated a series of bodies for how heavy they were, then viewed either 20 very thin figures or 20 very heavy figures, and then rated the same bodies for heaviness as they did at the start.
We found that children, adolescents and adults all rated the same bodies as significantly lighter after viewing the heavy bodies than they did beforehand. This suggests our participants' mental picture of a "normal" body got heavier, and so every body was perceived as "lighter" than it had been in comparison.
In contrast, those who viewed lighter bodies did not show this shift. They continued to rate the bodies as just as heavy or light as they had beforehand.
It's difficult to say for sure why this is, although it is likely in part due to the stimuli used. In my own wider research with adults using the same images, I've found that larger images tend to produce stronger effects than thin images, but experiments in other labs with adults using different stimuli have shown shifts in perception as a result of viewing both heavier and thinner bodies .
When we compared just the youngest children with the adult participants, we found that the effect of viewing heavy versus light bodies was equally strong in the seven-year-olds as it was in adult students.
These results tell us that the brain's "model" of a body becomes flexible in the same was as in adults by seven years of age.
Previous research shows that playing with ultra-thin dolls changes young girls' perceptions of the body they want to have, making them want it to be thinner.
Our new study shows that the effect of dolls on girls' body ideals isn't just driven by dolls being aspirational or pretty. Just visual exposure to bodies can change body perceptions. And that means that changing that visual experience, for instance by giving girls a broad range of body sizes and toys, is an important part of maintaining healthy body perceptions.
These results also mean that the large body of research on the effects of visual media on adults' body perceptions is also likely apply to children as young as seven. For instance, gaining access to television is associated with preferences for thinner bodies in rural communities, and viewing images of muscular male models increases preferences for muscle in male laboratory participants.
Therefore, all of the warnings and recommendations that exist in relation to reducing the biases in the bodies we see in adult's visual media also apply to children.
Young children in western countries have been shown to associate being heavier with being less pretty or less desirable as a friend . We therefore need to think about how body sizes are represented in all aspects of children's media and ensure that children do not have a bias towards one size or another if we don't want them to develop the strong thin ideals that we often see in adulthood.
Lynda Boothroyd does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
