How sexual objectification marks the brain: fMRI evidence of self-objectification and its harmful emotional consequences.

Female Sexual Objectification refers to perceiving and treating women based on their body appearance. This phenomenon may serve as a precursor for dysfunctional behaviors, particularly among females prone to self-objectification and experiencing shame emotions. Understanding this challenging trajectory by disclosing its neural consequences may be crucial for comprehending extreme psychopathological outcomes. However, investigations in this sense are still scarce. The present study explores the neural correlates of female participants' experiences of being objectified and their relationship with self-objectification, emotional responses and individual dispositions in self-esteem, emotion regulation abilities and self-conscious emotion proneness. To this aim, 25 female participants underwent an fMRI experimental session while they were exposed to interpersonal encounters with objectifying or non-objectifying men. Participants' experienced emotions and levels of attention shifted toward their bodies (self-objectification) was reported after each interaction. The results revealed increased brain activity in objectifying contexts, impacting cortical (frontal, occipital and temporal cortex) and subcortical regions (thalamus, and hippocampus) involved in visual, emotion, and social processing. Remarkably, the inferior temporal gyrus emerged as a crucial neural hub associated in opposite ways with self-esteem and the self-conscious emotion of shame, highlighting its role in self-referential processing during social dynamics. This study points out the importance of adopting a neuroscientific perspective for a deeper understanding of sexual objectification, and to shed light on its possible neural consequences.

Prepotent task-irrelevant semantic information is dampened by domain-specific control mechanisms during visual word recognition.

We investigated whether semantic interference occurring during visual word recognition is resolved using domain-general control mechanisms or using more specific mechanisms related to semantic processing. We asked participants to perform a lexical decision task with taboo stimuli, which induce semantic interference, as well as a semantic Stroop task and a Simon task, intended as benchmarks of linguistic-semantic and non-linguistic interference, respectively. Using a correlational approach, we investigated potential similarities between effects produced in the three tasks, both at the level of overall means and as a function of response speed (delta-plot analysis). Correlations selectively surfaced between the lexical decision and the semantic Stroop task. These findings suggest that, during visual word recognition, semantic interference is controlled by semantic-specific mechanisms, which intervene to face prepotent but task-irrelevant semantic information interfering with the accomplishment of the task's goal.