Developing a new measure of retrospective body dissatisfaction: links to postnatal bonding and psychological well-being.

Background: Pregnancy is a transformative time for women and their bodies, and therefore thoughts and feelings about the body understandably change during this period. While previous research has established the impact of body dissatisfaction on factors like antenatal attachment and maternal mental health, there is a notable gap in understanding its long-term effects on postnatal factors. This is often due to high attrition rates in longitudinal studies.

The role of bodily experiences during pregnancy on mother and infant outcomes.

Pregnancy is a transformative time for women and their bodies, and therefore thoughts and feelings and about one's own body and internal bodily sensations may understandably change during this period. Body satisfaction and interoception have been found to influence factors such as antenatal attachment (AA) and maternal mental health. However, mixed results in the literature suggest complex relationships between the bodily experience during pregnancy and outcomes, necessitating a broader investigative approach.

Body understanding measure for pregnancy scale (BUMPs): Cross-cultural adaptation and psychometric properties among Brazilian pregnant women.

The Body Understanding Measure for Pregnancy Scale (BUMPs) is a scale developed and validated for British pregnant women to assess body satisfaction during pregnancy. The aim of this study was to perform a cross-cultural adaptation and verify the psychometric properties of BUMPs for Brazilian adult pregnant women. The cross-cultural adaptation was performed using translation, back-translation, expert committee, expert analysis, and pre-testing, which showed easy comprehension by pregnant women.

Bonding with bump: Interoceptive sensibility moderates the relationship between pregnancy body satisfaction and antenatal attachment.

Problem: There is limited understanding and contradictory results regarding the contribution of the pregnant bodily experience to antenatal attachment.

Background: Antenatal attachment is an important aspect of pregnancy, which has been linked with positive maternal and infant outcomes. Given the profound physical process of pregnancy, it is likely that bodily experience is implicated in antenatal attachment, with research supporting the involvement of pregnancy body (dis)satisfaction.

The effects of yoga-based interventions on postnatal mental health and well-being: A systematic review.

Background: The postnatal period is a critical time for maternal mental health, presenting unique challenges and vulnerabilities. Identifying effective and accessible strategies to improve postnatal mental health and well-being is therefore crucial and could have substantial benefits for both mothers and babies, alongside broader implications for healthcare systems. Yoga is a potential intervention that has demonstrated notable benefits; however, a gap exists in systematically evaluating the existing literature on postnatal yoga-based interventions.

Multisensory processing and proprioceptive plasticity during resizing illusions.

Bodily resizing illusions typically use visual and/or tactile inputs to produce a vivid experience of one's body changing size. Naturalistic auditory input (an input that reflects the natural sounds of a stimulus) has been used to increase illusory experience during the rubber hand illusion, whilst non-naturalistic auditory input can influence estimations of finger length. We aimed to use a non-naturalistic auditory input during a hand-based resizing illusion using augmented reality, to assess whether the addition of an auditory input would increase both subjective illusion strength and measures of performance-based tasks.

Do selfies make women look slimmer? The effect of viewing angle on aesthetic and weight judgments of women's bodies.

Taking and posting selfies is a popular activity, with some individuals taking and sharing multiple selfies each day. The influence of the selfie angle, as opposed to more traditional photo angles such as the allocentric images we see in print media, on our aesthetic judgements of images of bodies has not been explored. This study compared the attractiveness and weight judgements that participants made of images of the same bodies taken from different visual angles over a series of four experiments (total N = 272).

Comparing body image dissatisfaction between pregnant women and non-pregnant women: a systematic review and meta-analysis.

Body image dissatisfaction refers to negative thoughts and feelings individuals have towards their own body appearance and this is thought to be affected by the physiological changes that occur during pregnancy. There are two main conflicting theories as to the effect pregnancy has on body image dissatisfaction: 1) Pregnancy related changes are in direct conflict with social ideas of female beauty (e.g.

The self, its body and its brain.

The body is intrinsic to our sense of self and as such, any theoretical account of the self should also include contributions of the body. This Collection incorporates a series of papers that demonstrate the inextricable relationship between body and self. The papers include studies of body illusions and studies of observed differences in bodily experience in participants with psychiatric and physical conditions.

Exploring the effects of gender and sexual orientation on disordered eating: an EFA to CFA study of the Eating Disorder Examination Questionnaire.

Several problems limit our understanding of the ways that gender and sexual orientation influence disordered eating. These include the reliance on measures that have been developed and validated in samples of cisgender heterosexual women, and the lack of confirmed measurement invariance that allows us to meaningfully compare these experiences between groups. This study was an EFA to CFA exploration of the Eating Disorder Examination Questionnaire in a group of heterosexual, bisexual, gay, and lesbian men and women.

Distinct neural signatures of multimodal resizing illusions.

Illusory body resizing typically uses multisensory integration to change the perceived size of a body part. Previous studies associate these multisensory body illusions with frontal theta oscillations and parietal gamma oscillations for dis-integration and integration of multisensory signals, respectively. However, recent studies also support illusory changes of embodiment from unimodal visual stimuli.

Four fundamental dimensions underlie the perception of human actions.

We evaluate the actions of other individuals based upon a variety of movements that reveal critical information to guide decision making and behavioural responses. These signals convey a range of information about the actor, including their goals, intentions and internal mental states. Although progress has been made to identify cortical regions involved in action processing, the organising principles underlying our representation of actions still remains unclear.

Interoceptive sensibility and body satisfaction in pregnant and non-pregnant women with and without children.

Pregnancy is a time of great physical and psychological change. As well as prominent changes in the external appearance of the body, such as the baby bump, there are also substantial changes taking place within the body. Our awareness of, and attention towards, internal bodily signals (interoception) is thought to have a direct impact on how we feel about our bodies.

Exploring the development of high-level contributions to body representation using the rubber hand illusion and the monkey hand illusion.

During development our body undergoes significant changes, yet we are able to maintain a coherent experience of our body and sense of self. Bodily experience is thought to comprise integration of multisensory signals (vision, touch, and proprioception) constrained by top-down knowledge of body appearance. Evidence from developmental studies suggests that low-level multisensory integration develops throughout childhood, reaching adult levels by 10 years of age.

The role of affective touch in whole-body embodiment remains equivocal.

Previous studies have highlighted that affective touch delivered at slow velocities (1-10 cm/s) enhances body-part embodiment during multisensory illusions, yet its role towards whole-body embodiment is less established. Across two experiments, we investigated the role of affective touch towards subjective embodiment of a whole mannequin body within the full body illusion, amongst healthy females. Participants perceived affective touch to be more pleasant than non-affective touch, but this did not enhance subjective embodiment within the illusion and no interaction between synchrony (Experiment 1), or congruency (Experiment 2), and the velocity of touch was observed.

An exploratory investigation into the longevity of pain reduction following multisensory illusions designed to alter body perception.

Background: Previous research suggests that multisensory body illusions that alter the conscious bodily experience can modulate pain in osteoarthritis, which may be a result of modifying cortical misrepresentations of the painful body part. However, the longevity and underlying mechanisms of such illusion-induced analgesia is unknown.

Objectives: This study aimed to investigate the therapeutic potential of body illusions, specifically examining the longevity of pain relief and effects on subjective joint flexibility.

Investigating the Components of Body Image Disturbance Within Eating Disorders.

Body image disturbance has been highlighted as a common characteristic within the development and maintenance of clinical eating disorders (EDs), represented by alterations in an individual's bodily experience. However, whilst the perceptual stability of the sense of body ownership has been investigated in ED patients, the stability of the sense of body agency in those with ED is yet to be examined. Therefore, body ownership and body agency were investigated using the moving rubber hand illusion, alongside measures of explicit and implicit body satisfaction.

Distinct neural response to visual perspective and body size in the extrastriate body area.

Neuroimaging research has independently implicated the extrastriate body area (EBA) in distinguishing between different visual perspectives and morphologies of bodies within visual processing. However, the combined processing of these physical attributes towards neural EBA response remains unclear, and may be crucial in influencing higher-order, aesthetic evaluation of bodies. Indeed, EBA alterations amongst eating disorder patients have been associated with disturbances in body image, and disruption to EBA activity amongst healthy individuals has been shown to influence aesthetic evaluations made towards bodies.

Development and validation of the Body Understanding Measure for Pregnancy Scale (BUMPS) and its role in antenatal attachment.

Pregnancy is a unique period in a woman's life during which her body undergoes rapid and dramatic change. Many of these changes are in direct conflict to social ideals of female body appearance, such as increases in body size and weight. Existing research that has examined body satisfaction in pregnancy is limited by the use of measures that are not designed for pregnancy, yielding biased results.

The Effect of Visual Capture Towards Subjective Embodiment Within the Full Body Illusion.

Typically, multisensory illusion paradigms emphasise the importance of synchronous visuotactile integration to induce subjective embodiment towards another body. However, the extent to which embodiment is due to the 'visual capture' of congruent visuoproprioceptive information alone remains unclear. Thus, across two experiments (total N = 80), we investigated how mere visual observation of a mannequin body, viewed from a first-person perspective, influenced subjective embodiment independently from concomitant visuotactile integration.

Eating Disorder Examination Questionnaire (EDE-Q): Norms and psychometric properties in U.K. females and males.

The Eating Disorder Examination Questionnaire (EDE-Q) is a widely used assessment of eating disorder psychopathology; however, EDE-Q norms are yet to be provided within a nonclinical U.K. adult sample.

Mr Fantastic Meets The Invisible Man: An Illusion of Invisible Finger Stretching.

Our brain continually integrates bottom-up sensory signals to create a coherent experience of the body. This bodily experience is also constrained by top-down knowledge of body appearance. However, the extent of these constraints has been challenged.

Implicit and explicit changes in body satisfaction evoked by body size illusions: Implications for eating disorder vulnerability in women.

Dissatisfaction with one's body is a widespread issue in modern society and has been linked to vulnerability for developing eating disorders. Recent studies have demonstrated a direct relationship between body perception and body satisfaction by manipulating perceived body size using multisensory body illusions. However, how these body size illusions influence implicit affective experience has not previously been examined.

The 'not-so-strange' body in the mirror: A principal components analysis of direct and mirror self-observation.

In this study we adopted a psychometric approach to examine how the body is subjectively experienced in a mirror. One hundred and twenty-four healthy participants viewed their body for five minutes directly or via a mirror, and then completed a 20-item questionnaire designed to capture subjective experiences of the body. PCA revealed a two-component structure for both direct and mirror conditions, comprising body evaluations (and alienation) and unusual feelings and perceptions.

Illusory Obesity Triggers Body Dissatisfaction Responses in the Insula and Anterior Cingulate Cortex.

In today's Western society, concerns regarding body size and negative feelings toward one's body are all too common. However, little is known about the neural mechanisms underlying negative feelings toward the body and how they relate to body perception and eating-disorder pathology. Here, we used multisensory illusions to elicit illusory ownership of obese and slim bodies during functional magnetic resonance imaging.