Women’s Health

Women's Brain respond Differently.

Phoenix – A recent report  featured at LIveScience and from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah suggests that even well-adjusted women who have a normal perception of body image have brain scans that reveal they are concerned about getting fat.

In the study, 10 normal weight women and nine normal weight men between the ages of 18 and 30 were examined. Both groups were shown images of people with different body shapes (either fat or thin) that matched the subjects gender.

With each image, the study subject was asked to “imagine someone is saying your body looks like hers/his”.

This all occurred while the subjects had their brains scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging. The results demonstrate that when women looked at images of overweight individuals, their brain scans showed a spike in activity in a region thought to be involved in self-reflection and evaluation of self-worth, the medial prefrontal cortex.

Anorexic and bulimic women also show increased activity in this region when they look at images of overweight persons, but their brain activity is more pronounced. The same spike in brain activity was not found when women pictured themselves as thin.

Men showed no change in activity in this brain area regardless of whether they pictured themselves as fat or thin, suggesting they do not experience the same self-reflection as women. Interestingly, previous work by Allen and his colleagues has shown that male body builders have brain activity patterns similar to bulimic women.

The investigators believe the contrasting results between the sexes is likely due to the social pressures on women to be thin in society, and not due to a biological difference.

“Even though they claim they don’t care about body issues…their brains are showing that it really bugs them to think about the prospect of being overweight,” said study researcher Mark Allen, a neuroscientist at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.

The current study cannot distinguish whether the spike in brain activity was due to negative feelings about being overweight, or simply the fact that these normal-weight women needed to picture themselves in a different way when they were asked to imagine themselves as fat. In other words, researchers might see the same spike in brain activity when overweight women look at images of thin women, because picturing themselves as thin requires that they alter their self-image.

The results will be published in the May issue of the journal Personality and Individual Differences.