Daniela Ruzzante

• PhD
• Assistant Professor (RTT) at University of Trento

Exploring the impact of sexual objectification within romantic relationships is an emerging field of study. Previous work has typically associated sexual objectification by a romantic partner with adverse outcomes for both the individual and the relationship. Our research sought to build upon and advance this emerging body of literature by investig...

Research on sexual objectification has mostly taken a heterosexual perspective and has studied gay men to understand when they become victims rather than agents of this phenomenon. In three studies we investigated gay men as agents of sexual objectification and the underlying motives that guide their biased perceptions. In Study 1, using electroenc...

Exploring the impact of sexual objectification within romantic relationships is an emerging field of study. Previous work has typically associated sexual objectification by a romantic partner with adverse outcomes for both the individual and the relationship. Our research sought to build upon and advance this emerging body of literature by investig...

Sexual objectification mostly targets women and occurs whenever they are treated as bodies for the use or consumption of others and stripped of their full humanity. While research has mostly focused on sexual harassment and aggression as the main behavioral consequence of sexual objectification, only a few studies have tried to focus on more subtle...

Highlights • Dehumanization has adverse effects at the intergroup, interpersonal, and self-levels. • Essential is the prevention of the denial of humanness toward outgroup members. • Hypotheses like the partner humanization can inhibit interpersonal dehumanization. • While meta-dehumanization or direct/indirect contact can act at an intergroup leve...

Men’s partner-sexual objectification has been linked to increased self-objectification and diminished well-being in women. Some recent findings have also demonstrated that men’s partner-sexual objectification is related to increased violence in the relationship. However, mechanisms driving this association remain unexplored. In the present research...

Dehumanization is a well-known phenomenon in which people are perceived and elaborated as less than fully human. At the same time, it has widely been demonstrated how human beings are elaborated through different cognitive and neural processes compared with objects. Integrating both types of literatures, the current article proposes to study dehuma...

Self-objectification leads women to view their bodies as objects to be evaluated by others and it is linked to several adverse outcomes, including body shame. Although a great amount of literature has focused on antecedents of self-objectification, scant research has investigated factors that may prevent this process. In our study, we tested whethe...

Recent research found that (self-)objectification may emerge within romantic heterosexual relationships leading to adverse outcomes for women’s well-being. Since the latter processes are based on unbalanced status relations, it is possible that personal power (i.e., the capacity to influence others) may be affected by women’s body image concerns. R...

Sexual objectification – perceiving or treating a woman as a sexual object – is a widespread phenomenon. Studies on sexual objectification and its consequences have grown dramatically over the last decades covering multiple and diverse areas of research. However, research studying sexual objectification might have limited internal and external vali...

Mentalization is the ability to perceive other people’s mental states. This research aimed to deepen our understanding of the underlying mechanisms while also exploring the timeline of the mentalization process. Two studies were conducted in which participants’ electrophysiological activity was measured while elaborating Black and White (Study 1),...

Our interactions with human and object stimuli are typically clearly distinct. Separate cognitive processes1 and separate brain regions2 subserve the elaboration of these two different types of stimuli. The human-object divide tends to fade, however, when people are objectified. Objectification occurs when a specific person is reduced to the status...

Objectification – reducing a someone to a something – represents a powerful and potentially damaging way in which we can see and treat others. Women are often victims of processes of objectification that occur whenever a woman is reduced to her body or certain body parts. What remains unclear is the extent to which a woman becomes an object when ob...