Why Might Women Justify Dating Violence? The Role of Men's Sexual Objectification of Their Romantic Partners Within Heterosexual Relationships.

Men's partner-sexual objectification has been linked to increased self-objectification and diminished well-being in women. Some recent findings have also demonstrated that men's partner-sexual objectification is related to increased violence in the relationship. However, mechanisms driving this association remain unexplored. In the present research, we collected data on women and men involved in heterosexual romantic relationships and investigated the associations between men's partner-sexual objectification, women's self-objectification, and both partners' attitudes toward dating violence. Study 1 (N = 171 heterosexual couples) provided first evidence for the link between men's partner-sexual objectification and their attitudes toward dating violence. Furthermore, men's attitudes toward dating violence mediated the relationship between sexual objectification of their partners and women's attitudes toward dating violence. These results were replicated in Study 2 (N = 235 heterosexual couples). Findings of this study also revealed that, along with men's attitudes toward dating violence, women's self-objectification acted as a mediating mechanism linking experiences of being sexually objectified by the romantic partner and attitudes toward dating violence in women. Implications of our findings for the issue of dating violence are discussed.

The Sexual OBjectification and EMotion database: A free stimulus set and norming data of sexually objectified and non-objectified female targets expressing multiple emotions.

Sexual objectification - perceiving or treating a woman as a sexual object - is a widespread phenomenon. Studies on sexual objectification and its consequences have grown dramatically over the last decades covering multiple and diverse areas of research. However, research studying sexual objectification might have limited internal and external validity due to the lack of a controlled and standardized picture database. Moreover, there is a need to extend this research to other fields including the study of emotions. Therefore, in this paper we introduce the SOBEM Database, a free tool consisting of 280 high-resolution pictures depicting objectified and non-objectified female models expressing a neutral face and three different emotions (happiness, anger, and sadness) with different intensity. We report the validation of this dataset by analyzing results of 134 participants judging pictures on the six basic emotions and on a range of social judgments related to sexual objectification. Results showed how the SOBEM can constitute an appropriate instrument to study both sexual objectification per se and its relation with emotions. This database could therefore become an important instrument able to improve the experimental control in future studies on sexual objectification and to create new links with different fields of research.

The timeline of mentalization: Distinguishing a two-phase process from mind detection to mind attribution.

Mentalization is the ability to perceive other people's mental states. This research aimed to deepen our understanding of the underlying mechanisms while also exploring the timeline of the mentalization process. Two studies were conducted in which participants' electrophysiological activity was measured while elaborating Black and White (Study 1), or Italian (ingroup) and Romanian (outgroup), human and doll-like faces (Study 2). Moreover, in Study 2 the presented faces differed in their Facial Width-to-Height Ratio. Subsequently, an Implicit Mind Attribution Test (IMAT) measured the strength of the association of the same ingroup and outgroup human stimuli with mind and body-related words. Two different phases in the time course of the mentalization process emerged. An early ERP component (N170) indicated a first difference between doll-like, mindless and human, mindful targets, while a later ERP component (P300) represented the second stage of mentalization. In this stage, outgroup doll-like faces were elaborated more similarly to the outgroup human faces compared to the same stimuli of the ingroup. Moreover, only a positive correlation between the P300 and the IMAT emerged indicating that the differences in this later ERP component were related with an implicit behavioral measure of mind attribution. These results stipulate the timeline of the mentalization process that is defined by an initial moment of mind detection, in which mindful and mindless stimuli are differentiated for the first time, and a second phase of mind attribution, where the interplay of perceptual and contextual information determine the extraction of a mind from a face.

Assessing neural responses towards objectified human targets and objects to identify processes of sexual objectification that go beyond the metaphor.

Objectification - reducing a someone to a something - represents a powerful and potentially damaging way in which we can see and treat others. Women are often victims of processes of objectification that occur whenever a woman is reduced to her body or certain body parts. What remains unclear is the extent to which a woman becomes an object when objectified. Using the oddball paradigm in three experiments, participants' neural activity was measured while they analyzed frequently presented male and female human stimuli and infrequently presented gender-matched doll-like objects. The infrequent doll-like objects were expected to trigger a late event-related neurophysiological response (P300) the more they were perceived different from the repeated, human stimuli (i.e., the oddball effect). In Experiment 1, the oddball effect was significantly smaller for objectified women compared to objectified men. Results of Experiment 2 confirmed that this effect was confined to objectified depictions of women. In Experiment 3, no semantic references to the human-object divide were provided, but objectified women were still perceived more similar to real objects. Taken together, these results are the first to demonstrate that the perception of women, when objectified, changes in essence beyond the metaphor.