By KARRIE WILLIAMS
Associate Director of College Relations

Readers of the syndicated comic strip "Cathy" know this 30-something, single career gal dreads swimsuit season more than a blind date, a call from her mom on a Friday night, or another wedding invitation. Why? A woman in a bathing suit has no secrets.

Associate professor Tomi-Ann Roberts, a social psychologist at Colorado College, and researchers from the University of Michigan and Duke University recently published a study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that aptly illustrates a woman's preoccupation with physical appearance.

"That Swimsuit Becomes You: Sex Differences in Self-Objectification, Restrained Eating, and Math Performance" reports the results of experiments on 350 young men and women. One of those experiments revealed that what a woman wears -- even when she is alone in a dressing room -- can heighten her preoccupation with how her body looks, at the expense of her mental performance.

When girls and women maintain an observer's perspective on their bodies, they can come across as timid and uncertain. Constantly checking your appearance in mirrors, adjusting a strap, or tugging on a skirt uses mental resources that are, by consequence, unavailable for challenging mental tasks, according to Roberts and her colleagues.

To test their theory, the researchers sent study participants into a dressing room and asked them to try on swimsuits. While wearing the suit, participants answered 20 questions about what they saw in the mirror and how they felt. The participants were then asked to take an advanced math test, again while still clad in swimming suits.

"Certainly the sheer bareness associated with trying on swimwear produces self-conscious emotions in most people," says Roberts. "But our study clearly demonstrated that experimentally induced self-objectification causes women to perform poorly on an advanced math test."

Self-objectification is the researchers' theory that individuals value their own bodies more from a third-person perspective, focusing on observable body attributes (e.g., "How do I look?") rather than from a first-person perspective, focusing on privileged or non-observable body attributes (e.g., "What am I capable of?" or "How do I feel?"). Roberts and her colleagues believe self-objectification leads to increased feelings of shame and, in particular, shame about one's body. Theoretical accounts of shame suggest that this emotion occurs when people compare themselves to some cultural ideal and come up short.

"These emotional and behavioral repercussions of self-objectification begin to document the psychological costs of raising girls in a culture that persistently objectifies the female body," Roberts says.

Although both the women and men in this study were concerned with how others view their physical appearance, only the women felt shame. Men reported feeling silly, awkward, and foolish in the dressing rooms; some were even heard to laugh through the closed doors. The women, on the other hand, reported disgust, distaste, and revulsion at their bathing-suit-clad reflections.

"Both were self-conscious but while the men felt embarrassed and sheepish," Roberts explains, "the women were disgusted. If a woman is ashamed and disgusted by her body, she believes she has violated a societal norm."

Roberts and her colleagues say the meanings our culture assigns to women's bodies should be altered. "If that happens, perhaps more girls and women could experience their bodies not as objects to be appreciated by others but rather more directly, with a sense of efficacy and empowered subjectivity."