The current study
guilt, anxiety
We designed the current study to address several weaknesses in the literature examining the effects of objectification on women’s cognitive performance. First, few researchers have distinguished between interpersonal manipulations of objectification (e.g., being a target of a sexualized male gaze or anticipating such a gaze, receiving an appearance compliment) and non-interpersonal manipulations that can increase awareness of one’s appearance (e.g., trying on a bathing suit, being photographed/video recorded). In the current study, we include both types of manipulations in order to distinguish their effects. We designed our experimental conditions to allow us to test the effect of self-objectification resulting from a heightened appearance focus (from being video recorded) and the effect of self-objectification when this heightened appearance focus was paired with anticipated interpersonal sexual objectification in the form of the male gaze.Second, although the original argument from Objectification Theory [Additionally, previous researchers who used difficult math exams as the key outcome variable and found significant effects have acknowledged that stereotype threat may be an alternate explanation for their pattern of results [Finally, we made several choices in the design of this study to increase confidence in the replicability of its results. In order to prevent the type of analytic flexibility associated with In the present study, we randomly assigned women to one of three conditions (control, self-objectification, or male gaze) and asked them to complete an attention-intensive working memory task. In the self-objectification and male gaze conditions, the women completed the task while being video recorded. Participants in the male gaze condition were additionally led to believe the videos would later be evaluated by men in the context of a dating study. We anticipated that women would report the highest levels of state self-objectification in the male gaze condition where the participant’s heightened appearance focus (resulting from being video recorded) was compounded with anticipating interpersonal objectification by men in the fictional dating study.The current experiment was modeled after previous work that used video recording or photographing from the neck down to simulate an objectifying gaze [Objectification Theory originally proposed that body monitoring can disrupt women’s conscious attention. As noted, self-objectification can be conceptualized as both a state and trait variable [In addition to the working memory task, women completed measures of state self-objectification (operationalized as body surveillance during the working memory task), guilt, anxiety, and body dissatisfaction (all variables that have been previously linked with objectification, see Moradi & Huang [