How do we ‘see’ ourselves in our mind’s eye? The question of how we represent our self has been at the centre of cultural practices across centuries, as the long tradition of self-portraits attests, and at the centre of our understanding of mental health issues such as body-image disorders. By implementing a reverse-correlation technique to measure self-representations, we were able to visualise participants’ mental images of both their faces and their body-shapes in a data-driven, unconstrained way, allowing us to visually depict how the self is ‘seen’ in our minds. Our technique was successful, revealing ‘self-portraits’ which were strikingly accurate. However, importantly, we discovered that the facial features of the self-portraits also contained ‘clues’ to each person’s self-reported personality traits, which were reliably detected by external observers. Finally, the higher the participants’ self-esteem with regards to social interactions, the more accurate and true-to-life their self-portraits were. Unlike the facial self-portraits, the body-shape portraits had negligible direct relationships with individuals’ actual body shape, but as with faces, they were significantly influenced by people’s beliefs and emotions; individuals with lower body self-esteem visually represented their bodies as wider. Together, our findings show how psychological beliefs and attitudes about one’s self bias the perceptual representation of one’s appearance, and provide a unique revealing window to into the internal mental representation of one’s self, with important implications for mental health and visual culture.
Obesity stigmatization and coping: Relation to mental health symptoms, body image, and self-esteem
