The impact of weight and negative body image on the body schema in undergraduate women.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Alterations of the sensory-motor body schema question the origins of such distortions. For example, in anorexia nervosa where patients think they are broader than they really are (body image) but act as if it was really the case (body schema). To date, the results of studies about what hinders the updating of the body schema so much (weight, body image) have been contradictory. METHODS: We therefore conducted two studies that aimed to assess the impact of weight and body image problems on body schema in 92 young women without anorexia nervosa. For this purpose, we used a new body schema assessment tool (SKIN) that is sensitive enough to detect fine alterations of body schema in seven different body parts. RESULTS: In Study 1, the thinness or overweight of the young women had a major impact on their tactile perception, especially because the assessed body part was a sensitive area for body dissatisfaction in young women (e.g., belly, thigh). In Study 2, the level of body dissatisfaction of the participants in its attitudinal and perceptual dimension also had a negative impact on their body schema, again in interaction with weight and body part. CONCLUSIONS: These results imply that body dissatisfaction and thinness are predictors of massive body schema distortions. An oversized body schema could maintain various weight-control behaviors, thus risking the development, maintenance, or relapse of an eating disorder.

I Reach Faster When I See You Look: Gaze Effects in Human-Human and Human-Robot Face-to-Face Cooperation.

Human-human interaction in natural environments relies on a variety of perceptual cues. Humanoid robots are becoming increasingly refined in their sensorimotor capabilities, and thus should now be able to manipulate and exploit these social cues in cooperation with their human partners. Previous studies have demonstrated that people follow human and robot gaze, and that it can help them to cope with spatially ambiguous language. Our goal is to extend these findings into the domain of action, to determine how human and robot gaze can influence the speed and accuracy of human action. We report on results from a human-human cooperation experiment demonstrating that an agent's vision of her/his partner's gaze can significantly improve that agent's performance in a cooperative task. We then implement a heuristic capability to generate such gaze cues by a humanoid robot that engages in the same cooperative interaction. The subsequent human-robot experiments demonstrate that a human agent can indeed exploit the predictive gaze of their robot partner in a cooperative task. This allows us to render the humanoid robot more human-like in its ability to communicate with humans. The long term objectives of the work are thus to identify social cooperation cues, and to validate their pertinence through implementation in a cooperative robot. The current research provides the robot with the capability to produce appropriate speech and gaze cues in the context of human-robot cooperation tasks. Gaze is manipulated in three conditions: Full gaze (coordinated eye and head), eyes hidden with sunglasses, and head fixed. We demonstrate the pertinence of these cues in terms of statistical measures of action times for humans in the context of a cooperative task, as gaze significantly facilitates cooperation as measured by human response times.