What can neuroimaging studies teach us about gender differences in body image concerns?

Concerns about body image are a key feature of eating disorders, which have been the topic of several messages of the day by now.  Eating disorders are far more common in women than in men; in fact, women are ten times more likely than men to develop an eating disorder. To understand why women may be more susceptible to developing eating disorders than men, a team of researchers investigated how healthy men and women’s brains responded to seeing words related to a negative body image. Participants were shown sets of ‘unpleasant’ body-image related words and ‘neutral’ words, and were asked to pick the word they thought was most unpleasant / neutral in the set, respectively, while lying in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner. The researchers found that women – but not men – showed enhanced activity in the amygdala for unpleasant body image words compared to neutral words. The amygdala has been associated with processing threats; thus, women might find stimuli relating to a negative body image threatening, while men do not. In contrast, men showed a greater activation in the left medial frontal gyrus when viewing the unpleasant compared to the neutral words, while women did not. This region may be involved in cognitive processing of emotional information. Overall, the authors suggest that while women may process words relating to a negative body image in a more emotional way, men may process them in a more cognitive way. A limitation of the study was that the researchers didn’t have a category of negative words NOT relating to body image, so it is difficult to know whether these effects were specific to body image. Nevertheless, pursuing this line of thinking further could shed light on why women are more likely to suffer from eating disorders than men.
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Source: Shirao, N., Okamoto, Y., Mantani, T., Okamoto, Y., & Yamawaki, S. (2005). Gender differences in brain activity generated by unpleasant word stimuli concerning body image: an fMRI study. The British Journal of Psychiatry,186, 48-53.