Nearly 85 % of emerging adults report using at least one social media site. Research suggests that viewing and internalizing unrealistic body ideals often displayed online may pose harmful effects on young people's body image. However, studies on the relationships between social media usage and body image have predominantly focused on women's drive for thinness.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPhilos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci
September 2023
Hundreds (if not thousands) of multisensory studies provide evidence that the human brain can integrate temporally and spatially discrepant stimuli from distinct modalities into a singular event. This process of multisensory integration is usually portrayed in the scientific literature as contributing to our integrated, coherent perceptual reality. However, missing from this account is an answer to a simple question: how do confidence judgements compare between multisensory information that is integrated across multiple sources, and multisensory information that comes from a single, congruent source in the environment? In this paper, we use the sound-induced flash illusion to investigate if confidence judgements are similar across multisensory conditions when the numbers of auditory and visual events are the same, and the numbers of auditory and visual events are different.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIs visual perception "rich" or "sparse?" One finding supporting the "rich" hypothesis shows that a specific visual summary representation, color diversity, is represented "cost-free" outside focally-attended regions in dual-task paradigms [1]. Here, we investigated whether this "cost-free" phenomenon for color diversity perception extends to peripheral vision. After replicating previous findings and verifying that color diversity is represented "cost-free" in central vision, we performed two experiments: in our first experiment, we extended the paradigm to peripheral vision and found that in minimally-attended regions of space, color diversity perception was impaired.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHistorically, western societies have considered body image issues to predominantly affect young, White women. While in recent years men's body image issues have been increasingly highlighted by researchers and the media alike, many instruments currently used to identify clinically significant body image disturbances were developed and validated with samples solely of women and/or girls. One such measure, Killen et al.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPolarization and extremism are often viewed as the product of psychological biases or social influences, yet they still occur in the absence of any bias or irrational thinking. We show that individual decision-makers implementing optimal dynamic decision strategies will become polarized, forming extreme views relative to the true information in their environment by virtue of how they sample new information. Extreme evidence enables decision makers to stop considering new information, whereas weak or moderate evidence is unlikely to trigger a decision and is thus under-sampled.
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