How easy is it to “misjudge” yourself?

© neurofeedback

Leviathan Press:

There is a saying that many people must have heard: the sound of our speech to others is actually different from our own, because when we speak, the sound is not only transmitted from the air to the ears, but also received by the ears through the head bone conduction. If you want to know how your voice sounds to other people's ears, you can only record your voice first and then play it. In another saying about appearance, the self we see in the mirror is 30% more beautiful than the real self (if I remember this data correctly), because our brain is too kind, and it is afraid that we can't accept our true appearance, so we do a brain-filled project... OK, it's good.

In 2020, we studied the mistakes people make in psychological cognition. But how well do we know our appearance? Given that you look in the mirror every day, you might think you have a pretty accurate idea of ​​your face and body. But it turns out that we can make some surprising mistakes in our assessments of our appearance.

Wrong face

It goes without saying that most of us are very familiar with our own faces, but that doesn't stop us from making mistakes. If you become extremely close friends with someone, you may find it difficult to distinguish your own face from theirs. The researchers who led the study suspect that this is because we absorb parts of our close friends into our self-concept.

A clever study published in early 2020 also found that our perception of our own personality also affects how we see our faces in our minds. For a person who described themselves as extroverted, their mental image of their face exaggerated extroversion-related traits. How we see ourselves mentally and physically seems to be closely linked, and this connection applies not only to our faces but also to our bodies.

(osf.io/9jrpu/)

Twisted body

In a test, members of the Face and Personality Research Team asked 39 young female students to draw self-portraits of their own body shapes. However, the subjects performed very poorly. In fact, their self-perceived hip width was very different from the actual value. In this study, self-esteem levels were closely related to these misconceptions - the lower the self-esteem level, the more likely people were to exaggerate the size of their hips, and the more likely they thought that the "typical" beauty should be thinner.

(journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09567976211018618)

© Love To Know

We also make mistakes related to our body shape. For example, when people feel strong, they tend to think they are taller than they actually are. In addition, according to a study published in the journal Cortex in 2019, generally healthy people have a distorted perception of their body shape and height. The 40 young subjects participating in the study overestimated the length of different body parts (such as hands and legs) and underestimated the volume of these parts. The research team believes that contrary to previous speculation, these findings further prove that healthy adults do not actually have a very accurate understanding of their own body shape.

(www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/01/120116154024.htm)

Weird body changes

While you may not be aware of every detail of your body, you might think your figure has remained fairly stable. Yet it's surprisingly easy to feel that you're changing drastically.

The "magic shoes" experiment led by Ana Tajadura-Jimenez is an excellent example. The subjects wore headphones and walked in sandals with microphones. Only the high-pitched sound of walking came through the headphones. This made the subjects feel lighter. Why? The research team believes that this is because the high-pitched walking sounds are generally made by small animals - in order to try to resolve this inconsistency, the subjects' brains automatically reduced their self-perceived body size.

(www.ucl.ac.uk/news/headlines/2014/nov/magic-shoes-how-hear-yourself-instantly-happy)

Tajadullah Jimenez has also recently been investigating the Pinocchio auditory illusion: if adults stretch their index finger when they hear a short rising tone, they perceive their finger as getting longer, but young children don’t experience this illusion, so it seems to be something we learn. Other studies have also found that we associate “high” sounds with higher physical locations, so Tajadullah Jimenez suspects that once we learn this association, it begins to influence our perception more subtly.

(www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-59979-0)

Can anyone feel their third hand?

© BMED Report

It’s one thing to feel like you’ve suddenly become a little lighter or that a finger is growing longer. But it’s another to be susceptible to more extreme body illusions. While the rubber hand illusion is classic and the three-hand illusion is cool, my personal favorite is the Barbie illusion, which makes you feel as big as a doll.

(pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15709864/)

(journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0017208)

In this study, subjects wore head-mounted display devices and watched videos shot from a doll’s perspective looking down at themselves. Next, the researchers repeatedly touched the doll and the subject’s thigh in the same spot at the same time. The reason this illusion occurs (similar to the “magic shoes” study) is that our brains use sensory input to construct and update our mental perception of “self” - if the input changes, our perception will also change.

(journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0020195)

Transformed Body

Similar methods can also make people feel like they have taken on someone else’s face, hands, or even their entire body. When we take on someone else’s body, we change other things, too. Psychologists have made people feel like they have taken on Einstein’s body (which improved their cognitive abilities) and Freud’s body (which improved the quality of their advice). As research published in 2021 illustrates (again using similar techniques), it’s possible to make people feel like they’ve been copied, with another version of themselves in the same room.

(www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00917/full)

(www.nature.com/articles/srep13899)

(www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053810021001495)

Experiments with body swapping with friends have also yielded some interesting results. Going back to research on mental images of faces and personality, Pawel Tacikowski and colleagues at the Karolinksa Institute in Sweden used the Barbie illusion to have a person "inhabit" the body of a friend and found that the person also took on similar psychological traits to their friend. So if they thought their friend was very talkative and confident, their self-ratings on those traits would improve after the body swap. This further confirms that our physical and psychological self-perceptions are linked to our sense of "who" we are.

(linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S2589004220306192)

sound

Another aspect of our bodies that often confuses us is the way we sound. Many of us can relate to the experience of hating our own voice when we first hear it on a recording. Psychologists documented this phenomenon, called "voice antagonism," as early as 1966. This is because when we speak, more low-frequency sounds travel through bone conduction than we hear through air alone. So in a recording, our voice sounds higher-pitched than we're used to, which can be unsettling because it makes us question our self-perception.

However, there are times when the pitch of your voice may be higher than what you actually hear. A study published in the journal PLOS One showed that we tend to speak with higher pitches to those with higher status (bosses, high achievers, etc.). Higher pitched voices are perceived as less dominant, so this can be a signal of subordination, which may or may not work for you depending on the situation - but it's something to know regardless.

(journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0179407)

Body dysmorphic disorder

There are few areas where people have more extreme misconceptions about their bodies than about their bodies. Although healthy people do have misconceptions, when someone is obsessively focused on imperfections in their appearance—imperfections that either don’t exist or are exaggerated in their mind—then they suffer from body dysmorphic disorder.

© Baptist Health

Research suggests that the condition affects one in 50 people, and there are concerns that selfie filters designed to "fix" imperfections could make it worse. For some people, their body misperceptions are about their own body shape - they perceive themselves to be thinner, less muscular or heavier than they actually are. This can have serious consequences, as body misperceptions can lead to eating disorders including anorexia.

(www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.31887/DCNS.2010.12.2/abjornsson)

(www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1001/jamafacial.2018.0486)

(link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40519-020-01018-y)

Research shows that while we think we know our bodies well, the truth is quite different: Not only are we prone to misperceptions about every aspect of our appearance, our psychological control over our bodies is also quite fragile.

By Emma Young

Translated by Pharmacist

Proofreading/Amanda

Original article /digest.bps.org.uk/2022/03/14/how-well-do-you-know-what-you-look-like-research-on-self-perception-digested/

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The article only reflects the author's views and does not necessarily represent the position of Leviathan