PREDICTORS AND EFFECTS OF SELF-OBJECTIFICATION IN LESBIANS

The majority of research on self-objectification has focused on heterosexual women's experiences. This study sought to examine experiences of self-objectification in lesbian women. A path model was developed to examine the relationships between participants' feminist self-identification, levels of internalized heterosexism, objectified body consciousness, and the clinically relevant variables of negative eating attitudes and depression. As has been found with heterosexual women, body surveillance led to shame, which led to negative clinical outcomes. A direct path was also found between levels of surveillance and negative eating attitudes, consistent with previous research on self-objectification among lesbians. Feminist self-identification was not significantly related to the other variables, in contrast to previous research with heterosexual women. Internalized heterosexism was related to negative clinical outcomes, both indirectly through objectification variables and directly to depressive symptomatology. These results provide evidence that self-objectification and internalized heterosexism have negative impacts on the mental health of lesbian women.     

Central and peripheral precuing of forced-choice discrimination

There are suggestions in the literature that spatial precuing of attention with peripheral and central cues may be mediated by different mechanisms. To investigate this issue, data from two previous papers were reanalysed to investigate the complete time course of precuing target location with either: (1) a peripheral cue that may draw attention reflexively, or (2) a central, symbolic cue that may require attention to be directed voluntarily. This analysis led to predictions that were tested in another experiment. The main result of this experiment was that a peripheral cue produced its largest effects on discrimination performance within 100 msec, whereas a central cue required approximately 300 msec to achieve maximum effects. In conjunction with previous findings, the present evidence for time differences between the two cuing conditions suggests that more than one process is involved in the spatial precuing of attention.     

Attention effects on form discrimination at different eccentricities

Considerable disagreement exists in the visual attention literature about how attention is allocated over the visual field. One frequently expressed metaphor is that attention moves like a spotlight, and in some variants it is assumed that attention takes longer to shift to targets further from fixation. In order to test this metaphor, five experiments were conducted in which target location was precued and form discrimination accuracy was assessed. By varying the interval between the precue and the target (stimulus onset asynchrony, SOA), a time course of attention effects was obtained for targets at 2°, 6°, and 10° eccentricity. In the first three experiments, precueing effects were found, but there were no differences in performance as a function of eccentricity for very short SOAs, with either a peripheral cue or a foveal arrow cue. For long SOAs, however, performance was better for targets that were closer to fixation. In Experiments 4 (peripheral cue) and 5 (foveal cue), the targets were scaled to make them equally discriminable at all eccentricities. Again precueing effects were found, but there were no differences in accuracy as a function of eccentricity for most SOAs. These results suggest that attention shifting is not analogous to a constant-velocity moving spotlight.