Enhancing Resilience from Within

As humans, we have a continuing experience of our body, so that when we look ourselves in the mirror, when we walk, or when we have a stomach ache we think of these experiences as belonging to the same body. Decades of has however shown that in fact our brain holds many different models of the body; for example there are wide differences between how the body is represented in the mind ‘from the outside’, as when seen in mirrors and ‘from the inside’, as when we experience pain, or a racing heart.

Importantly, these different representations of the body can be influenced by both external and internal sources. For example images of other bodies in the media may affect how we think about our body as viewed by others (see Message of the Day 18th of January). Interestingly, the perception of bodily feelings such as the ones accompanying joy or, enthusiasm may also influence how we view other bodies. For example, classic studies in psychology have shown that when men where tricked to think that their hearts were beating faster in response to viewing pictures of certain seminude women, they subsequently rated these women as objectively more beautiful than other women for which they thought their heart beats had not changed during the initial viewing (Vallins, 1966).

Can such internal bodily feelings also influence how we view our own body? A recent studiy conducted in the lab of Professor Manos Tsakiris’s suggest that they can. They used a measure of body ownership (namely the Rubber Hand Illusion; see Message of the Day: 22nd of January) to quantify the extent to which 46 healthy women experienced ownership over a plastic but realistic rubber-hand. They also measured the ability of these women to detect and count their own heartbeats. Based on the results on this heartbeat counting task, they divided the women into two groups. Those, whose counts closely matched their actual heartbeat as measured objectively by special equipment, formed the ‘high’ performance group. By contrast, those who were not as good on the task formed the ‘low’ performance group. The researchers then combined all the above results and found that women in the low performance group experienced a stronger illusion of ownership over the rubber hand, while the ones who were in the high performance group were less persuaded by the rubber hand illusion. Tsakiris and colleagues concluded that that people who are worse in monitoring signals from within the body may be more susceptible to externalized images of the body and hence more likely to experience body image dissatisfaction in modern society. As people with anorexia have been shown to have poor cardiac awareness (Pollatos et al., 2008), it is likely that their body image distortions may also relate to their poor awareness of internal bodily signals. Indeed, subsequent studies have shown that people with anorexia are more easily swayed by the rubber hand illusion (Eshkevari et al., 2012; see also Message of the Day: 22nd of January). These findings suggest that a possible way to reverse body image dissatisfaction and anorexia is to enhance the perception of internal body signals with either psychological or neuroscientific means. Such enhancement could lead to body image resilience, the central goal of the current campaign and our future studies.

Eshkevari, E. Rieger, M.R. Longo, P. Haggard, J. Treasure. (2012). Increased plasticity of the bodily self in eating disorders. Psychological Medicine, 42, pp. 819–828.

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Wiesmann M, Schandry R. Reduced perception of bodily signals in anorexia nervosa. Eat Behav. 2008 Dec;9(4):381-8. doi: 10.1016/j.eatbeh.2008.02.001.

Tsakiris, M., Jiménez, A. T. & Costantini, M. (2011). Just a heartbeat away from one’s body: interoceptive sensitivity predicts malleability of body-representations. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological sciences, 278, 1717, p. 2470-2476

Vallins (1966) Cognitive effects of false heart-rate feedback. Journal Personality and Social Psychology, 4: 400-8.