The Influence Of Sexualization Degree On Social Perception And Its Neural Mechanism

A person’s appearance inevitably affects our judgment in forming perceptions of others.Sexualization,as a form of external expression,has an important influence on social perception.Previous studies on the influence of external forms on social perception mostly focus on the face level,while sexualization has little effect on social perception.In addition,most literatures only study the influence of sexualization on a certain trait,without in-depth discussion from the perspective of social perception.Importantly,the neural mechanism of the influence of sexualization on social perception remains unclear.Considering the fact that women are more likely to express sexual information in the workplace,this study used behavioral and ERP methods to collect college students’ evaluation of women’s pictures with different degrees of sexualization,which is investigated the influence of sexualization on social perception and its neural mechanism.Experiment 1 used a 3(sexualization degree: high,medium,low)×2(social perception content: warmth,competence)within-subject design.After viewing images of women with varying degrees of sexualization,the participants were asked to rate warmth/competence on a six-point scale.The results showed that women with low degree of sexualization scored higher on competence than scored on warmth.Women with medium and high degrees of sexualization had lower scores of competences and higher scores of warmth,indicating that higher degrees of sexualization improved the evaluation of perceived objects’ warmth and decreased the evaluation of perceived objects’ ability.Furthermore,the difference of response time(RT)was also found in Experiment 1,which was mainly reflected in the competence traits.The RT of medium and high sexualization degrees competence was longer than that of low sexualization degree.Experiment 2 also used a within-subject design of 3(sexualization degree: high,medium,low)×2(social perception content: warmth,competence).The difference was the words of social perception(competence/warmth)were presented first in Experiment 2,and then the sexualized images were presented.We recorded EEG signals during the presentation of sexualized images.The results showed that the main effects of sexualization degree and social perception were significant at N1 stage.Specifically,low sexualization degree induced a more negative N1 amplitude,and warmth induced a more negative N1 amplitude compared competence.At P200 stage,the main effect of sexualization degree was still significant,and the lower sexualization degree induced a larger P200 amplitude.The interaction between the sexualization degree and the social perception content was significant,and the P200 amplitude of competence was larger than that of warmth at the high degree of sexualization.High sexualization warmth produced a larger N300 amplitude than high sexualization competence in the N300 stage.Besides,low sexualization degree on warmth produced a larger LPP amplitude than competence.In a word,the following conclusions can be drawn from this study:(1)Women of low sexualization are considered to have higher competence and lower warmth level,while women of medium and high sexualization are considered to have lower competence and higher warmth level.(2)In the social perception of personal traits,there was a processing advantage to warmth,which is that warmth caused more negative N1 amplitude than competence.(3)Individuals’ sexualization characteristics are recognized and processed at an early stage,and low sexualization degree causes more negative N1 amplitude.(4)The effect of sexualization degree on social perception lasted from the early processing stage(170-230ms)to the late decision-making stage(500-700ms).P200,N300 and LPP components were all influenced by the interaction between the degree of sexualization and the content of social perception.