Hsu, Sheng-Yao; (2024) Social Cognitive Processes in Body Representation: Experimental and Psychophysical Evidence. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

Text PhD thesis_Social Cognitive Processes in Body Representation Experimental and Psychophysical Evidence_peterSYHsu_final.pdf - Accepted Version Access restricted to UCL open access staff until 1 July 2025. Download (16MB)

Abstract

The way we construct a representation of our body in the mind is known to be influenced by many sources of information. Some of this information derives from the body itself, such as sensory signals, yet it is increasingly understood that our body representation is also influenced by our prior experience and related learned expectations. In addition, both the new sensory signals and the learned expectations of our body are derived not only from interactions with the physical world but also from interactions with the social world. However, experimental and psychophysical support regarding the effects of such social factors on the various facets of body representation remains limited. In this thesis, we examined across four different studies, the influence of both learned social expectations, such as attachment styles, and novel social interactions, such as social rejection, on key facets of body representation, including the perception and attitudes towards our external body appearance (body image), the perception of internal bodily signals, such as cardiac perception (interoception) and perceptions of social interactions at the boundaries of the body, namely social touch experiences. To this end, I developed, used and combined a number of psychophysical tasks, such as a body-specific social rejection task, ‘MeetMyBody’, and a body-specific decision-making task about risk; we applied a recently validated task of cardiac interoception, ‘the Heart Rate Discrimination task’, and took advantage of the larger survey on social touch in the UK. Using these methods, I conducted a series of studies in healthy individuals to first investigate: 1) how one’s subclinical disordered eating traits and related psychological traits influence the perception of interoceptive and exteroceptive signals, then explore 2) how subclinical disordered eating traits and related psychological traits influence the effect of bodily rejection on the risk that one takes about body image. Our studies revealed that individuals with heightened subclinical disordered eating and anxious attachment tended to show impaired perception of bodily signals and increased sensitivity to bodily social interactions, affecting their responses to the body. This research expanded on existing literature in two key aspects: firstly, by suggesting the influence of early negative tactile experiences on these tendencies, and secondly, by exploring the negative effects of these traits on regulating the attentional shift between internal (interoceptive) focus and external stimuli. In summary, these empirical findings might provide important implications for current explanations of the relationships between social cognitive processes and body representation.

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