The neural correlates of sexual objectification

According to estimates by the United Nations Organization for Women, every third woman worldwide becomes a victim of either physical and/or sexual violence by men at least once in their lifetime, a violation of human rights reckoned to be a worldwide public health problem. This phenomenon is aggravated by the fact that often the violence is accompanied by violence-supportive attitudes, creating a culture in which violence is not clearly condemned and even subtly condoned or encouraged. It has been proposed that reduced empathy for the suffering of the victim is a key factor for enabling violent as well as for preventing helping behaviors, and a consequence of sexual objectification, defined as the reduction of an individual to her/his sexual body parts. For example, it has been shown that perceiving women as sexual objects elicits less concern for them when they become a victim of sexual assault, and that they are considered as more responsible for being raped, while their rapists are blamed less for their violence. In spite of the growing interest in the interpersonal aspects of sexual objectification, a comprehensive understanding of how and why perceiving others as sexual objects affects our behaviors towards them is completely lacking. Motivated by recent findings showing that empathic brain responses toward sexually objectified women are reduced compared to non-objectified women, the present project will use functional magnetic resonance imaging and behavioral tasks to pinpoint the proximate mechanisms of such reduced empathic responses. Furthermore, it aims to uncover how changes in empathic responses towards sexually objectified targets relate to helping the person in need. Compared to sexual objectification of women, objectification of male individuals has been studied far less, although it has recently been called out as an important issue requiring more extensive investigations. Therefore, the project will investigate both sexually objectified female and male individuals, in order to disclose if reduced empathy and helping is or is not a gender-specific phenomenon. By means of a multi-method approach drawing upon methods and expertise from social, cognitive, and experimental psychology on the one side, and state-of-the-art neuroscience on the other, we expect our project to generate invaluable novel insights into the driving forces behind sexual objectification, and its consequences on social outcomes. Insights gained from the project will have far-reaching ramifications for theoretical accounts of empathy, prosocial behavior, and dehumanization.