Researchers have figured out why women feel more ojectified than men.
Psychologist Sarah Gervais, and a team of reserachers from the University of Nabraska-Lincoln, looked at two types of visual processing: global and local. Global processing is used to discern whole figures, like human faces, as opposed to just seeing the mouth. While local processing picks out just a part.
Researchers theorised that if a person feels objectified it's because local processing is used to view them more often, according to the paper published in the European Journal of Social Psychology.
They recruited 227 university students for two studies, Medical Daily reported. In the first, participants were shown pictures of whole bodies of men and women. They then observed the same pictures with sexualised areas like the chest and legs slightly altered. Researchers found both men and women were better able to pick up subtle changes in the female figure than in the male. This is because the students were paying more attention to the female parts, as opposed to the whole, the researchers say.
The second test asked particpants to looked at letters made up of others letters - like the letter B made up of small Cs. Some participants were asked to identify the large letter, others the small. They were then asked to complete the first experiment.
