Thaindian News

Washington, April 14 (IANS) Brain scan show that many women who are not seemingly concerned about how they look actually fear getting fat, researchers say.
Brigham Young University (BYU) researchers in the US used MRI technology to observe what happened in the brain as these women viewed images of complete strangers.

If the stranger happened to be overweight and female, it surprisingly activated an area that processes identity and self-reflection in women’s brains. Men did not show signs of any self-reflection in similar situations.

“These women have no history of eating disorders and project an attitude that they don’t care about body image,” said Mark Allen, BYU neuroscientist. “Yet under the surface is an anxiety about getting fat and the centrality of body image to self.”

Allen worked with graduate student Tyler Owens and BYU psychology professor Diane Spangler.

Spangler and Allen collaborated on a long-term project to improve treatment of eating disorders by tracking progress with brain imaging.

When anorexic and bulimic women view an overweight stranger, the brain’s self-reflection centre - known as the medial prefrontal cortex - lights up in ways that suggest extreme unhappiness and in some cases self-loathing.

The motivation for this new study was to establish a point of reference among a control group of women who scored in the healthy range on eating disorder diagnostic tests. Surprisingly, even this control group exhibited what Allen calls “sub-clinical” issues with body image.

Seeing that, Allen and Owens ran the experiments with a group of men for comparison. “Although these women’s brain activity doesn’t look like full-blown eating disorders, they are much closer to it than men are,” Allen said.

Spangler says women are bombarded with messages that perpetuate the thin ideal, and the barrage changes how they view themselves, said a BYU statement.

“Many women learn that bodily appearance and thinness constitute what is important about them, and their brain responding reflects that,” Spangler said. “I think it is an unfortunate and false idea to learn about oneself and does put one at greater risk for eating and mood disorders.”

“It’s like the plant in my office,” she continued. “It has the potential to grow in any direction, but actually only grows in the direction of the window - the direction that receives the most reinforcement.”

These findings are slated for publication in the May issue of Personality and Individual Differences.