Sarah J. Gervais

Emerging research indicates that dehumanization may occur in couples with serious consequences; however, this research is in its infancy, and there is a need to integrate dehumanization perspectives with key theories of intimate relationships to best understand this phenomenon. Drawing on work on individuation in couples, we present an integrated f...

Objective: Bystanders are often present at the early signs of sexual risk, before a sexual assault occurs, positioning them to prevent sexual violence. However, few reliable and validated measures assess whether individuals intervene at the first indicators of risk. To address this gap, we developed the Bystander Reactions to Early Assault Cues Too...

Aims/Background. Although the Pregnancy-Related Anxiety Scale – also referred to as the Pregnancy-Related Thoughts Scale (PRT) – is one of the most widely utilised measures of pregnancy-related anxiety (PrA), there is limited research exploring its factor structure and psychometric properties. The present study sought to (a) explore the factor stru...

Free copy of the Individuality in Couples Questionnaire (ICQ) with scoring instructions.

Despite multiple theories and treatment modalities emphasizing the importance of individuality in couple relationships, the field is lacking a reliable and valid measure of this construct. In the present study, we developed the Individuality in Couples (ICQ) questionnaire and demonstrated its strong psychometric properties across two samples of par...

Pregnancy represents a unique time during which women’s bodies undergo significant physical changes (e.g., expanding belly, larger breasts, weight gain) that can elicit increased objectification. Experiences of objectification set the stage for women to view themselves as sexual objects (i.e., self-objectification) and are associated with adverse m...

Sexual objectification (i.e., reducing a person to their appearance, body, or sex appeal and functions) is a significant risk factor for negative health outcomes. In the present investigation, we examined multiple manifestations of objectification (i.e., objectification of others, objectification of self, and objectification by others) in an interp...

Pregnancy represents a unique time during which women’s bodies undergo significant physical changes (e.g., expanding belly, larger breasts, weight gain) that can elicit increased objectification. Experiences of objectification set the stage for women to view themselves as sexual objects (i.e., self-objectification) and is associated with adverse me...

This study examined whether sexual objectification (i.e., reducing someone to a sex object via a disproportionate focus on appearance and sexual characteristics) was associated with decreased confidence in future bystander intervention to reduce the risk for sexual violence (i.e., bystander efficacy) through several barriers to intervention: failin...

Objective: Colleges and universities are increasingly adopting affirmative consent standards of sexual assault, in which consent is defined as conscious and voluntary "yeses" given throughout a sexual interaction. We examined the impact of affirmative consent standards on perceptions of assault and consent. Hypotheses: We hypothesized that in se...

Women frequently send sexualized nude images to men (i.e., nudes), but women's motivations for sending nudes are unclear because there are methodological limitations in the ways that cyber sexual activity has been defined and measured. To address these gaps in the literature, we employed a mixed method triangulation design to assess young women's m...

While the literature has shown that sexually objectifying women leads to negative outcomes for the target and perceiver, measures of objectification perpetration are often adaptations of measures designed to assess targets' self-objectification or reported experiences of objectifying behaviors. In the present article, we introduce the Objectificati...

In this commentary, we argue that feminist science and open science can benefit from each other’s wisdom and critiques in service of creating systems that produce the highest quality science with the maximum potential for improving the lives of women. To do this, we offer a constructive analysis, focusing on common methods used in open science, inc...

Alcohol consumption is on the rise among U.S. women, especially college women, despite the negative consequences that uniquely and disproportionately affect them. The current work integrates objectification theory and related research with literature on drinking motivations to explore how women’s experiences living in a culture that constantly obje...

Objectification occurs when a person is perceived akin to an object. Recent research has defined objectification as a process through which a person is reduced to her constituent features (e.g., body parts) in a way that resembles how objects are processed. The inversion effect (better recognition for upright stimuli than for inverted ones) has oft...

Consistent with objectification theory, the primary goal of the present study was to investigate the role of perceived humanization from one’s intimate partner as a predictor of depression (i.e., symptom severity), eating disorders (i.e., body dissatisfaction), and sexual dysfunction (i.e., dissatisfaction with quality of the sexual relationship) d...

We propose a new method to test the reliability of Fredrickson et al.’s self-objectification questionnaire (SOQ). This scale being based on a ranking, traditional reliability estimates are inappropriate. Based on generalizability theory, we suggest to compute the reliability of each subset of questions related to physical appearance vs. physical co...

Although objectification is a common experience for women (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997), little is understood about how women perceive sources of objectifying commentary and behaviors. The current work provides a novel integration of objectification and consistency theories to understand how valence of sexual objectification and women’s feelings ab...

Women’s self-sexualization and belonging may be inextricably connected. Self-sexualization, or intentionally engaging in activities to appear sexually appealing to others, may carry intrapersonal costs but also interpersonal benefits. Integrating objectification, belonging, and ostracism theories, we tested whether social exclusion increases women’...

Objectification theory suggests that sexualization has significant dehumanizing consequences for how perceivers see women. To date, research has mostly documented how sexualized bodies in the mass media are objectified and dehumanized. The purpose of the present work was to test the novel cosmetics dehumanization hypothesis (CDH), that is, that sub...

According to objectification theory, being treated as an object leads women to engage in self-objectification, which in turn increases body surveillance and body shame, impairing women’s mental health. While most studies focusing on self-objectification rely heavily on Western populations that emphasize individualism, the current work investigates...

According to objectification theory (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997), being treated as an object leads women to engage in self-objectification, which in turn increases body surveillance and body shame, impairing women’s mental health. While most studies focusing on self-objectification rely heavily on Western populations that emphasize individualism,...

Interpersonal objectification shapes women’s sense of self, increasing self-objectification. While objectification is theorized to occur with consequences for self-objectification in romantic relationships, little research has examined this possibility. This experiment sampled 61 heterosexual couples to examine effects of objectification in relatio...

Sexual objectification is a subtle manifestation of sexist discrimination and violence against women that involves seeing and treating women as sex objects of male sexual desire. The primary aim of this research was to connect sexual objectification experiences with heterosexual intimate partner violence. This set of studies examined the impact of...

Purpose In many countries, service workers' (e.g. restaurant staff, bartenders) income depends highly on tips. Such workers are often female and targeted by sexual harassment. The purpose of this paper was to investigate whether the mode of compensation (tips vs. no tips) could play a causal role in the perceived legitimacy of sexual harassment. D...

Feminist scholars have called for gender researchers to consider gene-environment interactions for gender-imbalanced disorders (Salk and Hyde Psychology of Women Quarterly, 36, 395–411, 2012). Responding to these calls, the present study integrates objectification theory (Fredrickson and Roberts Psychology of Women Quarterly, 21, 173–206, 1997) and...

Reference for the published paper: Bernard, P., Content, J., Servais, L., Wollast, R., & Gervais, S. (2020). An Initial Test of the Cosmetics Dehumanization Hypothesis: Heavy Makeup Diminishes Attributions of Humanness-Related Traits to Women. Sex Roles. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-019-01115-y

Sexual objectification is one of most the common manifestations of discrimination against women in Western societies; however, few studies have examined objectification in the context of romantic relationships. The primary aim of the present research was to bring the study of objectification phenomena into the setting of heterosexual romantic relat...

Despite growing scientific interest in the sexually objectifying male gaze, the relation between men’s gazing behavior and their sexually objectifying attitudes has not yet been examined. The present study addressed this gap in the literature. Sixty-one heterosexual Israeli men viewed photographs of female targets while their spontaneous eye moveme...

The purpose of the present research was to examine the perceptions of women who drink in social contexts through the lens of dehumanization (Haslam 2006). Across three experiments, we manipulated the presence of alcohol by depicting a woman at a bar with a bottle of beer or a bottle of water and measured dehumanization. As hypothesized, women were...

Despite literature revealing the adverse consequences of objectifying gazes for women, little work has empirically examined origins of objectifying gazes by perceivers. Integrating alcohol myopia and objectification theories, we examined the effects of alcohol as well as perceived female attractiveness, warmth, and competence on objectifying gazes....

In this work, we introduced and tested the balanced objectification hypothesis (BOH). Derived from an integration of balance theory and objectification research, the BOH suggests that people seek psychological balance during objectifying interactions with others. Corresponding with the BOH, men and women perceived objectification sources as higher...

Recent research found that sexualized bodies are visually processed similarly to objects. This article examines the effects of skin-to-clothing ratio and posture suggestiveness on cognitive objectification. Participants were presented images of upright versus inverted bodies while we recorded the N170. We used the N170 amplitude inversion effect (l...

Official crime statistics and self-reports of sexual aggression perpetration are limited by various factors (e.g., lack of reporting, social desirability bias), as well as an inability to use these measures in experimental studies of sexual aggression. To address these issues, Nagayama Hall et al. (1994) developed a laboratory analog measure of sex...

Official crime statistics and self-reports of sexual aggression perpetration are limited by various factors (e.g., lack of reporting, social desirability bias), as well as an inability to use these measures in experimental studies of sexual aggression. To address these issues, Nagayama Hall et al. (1994) developed a laboratory analog measure of sex...

Objectification occurs when people are seen and treated similarly to things. Research on this topic has been dominated by an interest in the content of impressions people form of targets, but much less is known about the processes involved in the objectification of others. To fill this gap, this paper reviews a recent line of research that investig...

Objective: This research developed and examined the psychometric properties of the 15-item Interpersonal Sexual Objectification Scale-Perpetration Version (ISOS-P). Method: Specifically, the ISOS-P was developed by modifying the original Interpersonal Sexual Objectification Scale (Kozee, Tylka, Augustus-Horvath, & Denchik, 2007) to assess sexual ob...

Objectification studies have mostly focused on why and how women are objectified, but relatively little is known about what drives the objectification of men. This article aims to examine the objectifying gaze toward men, which is operationalized in the present article as decreased focus on men's faces and increased focus on men's body parts (arms,...

At an early stage of visual processing, human faces and bodies are typically associated with larger N170s when presented in an inverted (vs. upright) position, indexing the involvement of configural processing. We challenged this view and hypothesized that sexualized bodies would not be sensitive to inversion, thereby suggesting that they would be...

Women are often stereotyped as poorly equipped to deal with money matters, compared to men, yet very little research has examined the underpinnings and consequences of such gender stereotypes. Drawing on descriptive and prescriptive elements of women’s social roles, we empirically examined the gendered nature of money stereotypes. Specifically in t...

In this article, the authors focus on the linkages between objectification and current societal manifestations of sexual violence toward women to make the case that everyday instances of objectification can provide the foundation for more extreme forms of violence. First, they formally introduce the notion of objectification and explain its origins...

Sexual objectification is a significant problem that permeates all areas of women's lives including the workplace. This research examines the impact of sexual objectification on women in work settings by integrating objectification, sexual harassment, and affective forecasting theories. We used a laboratory analogue that included undergraduate wome...

In 2 studies, we found support for current sexual harassment jurisprudence. Currently, the courts use a 2-prong test to determine the viability of a sexual harassment claim: that the adverse treatment is sufficiently severe or pervasive to alter conditions of employment based on a protected class from the perspective of the individual complainant (...

Objective: Despite the high prevalence rates of street harassment for women, few studies have examined negative outcomes of this distressing experience. The current study aimed to further this area of inquiry by investigating potential consequences of street harassment, including perceptions of safety and anxiety among college women. Specifically,...

Objective: Recent research grounded in objectification theory reveals significant positive associations between experiences of sexual objectification and sexual assault victimization. However, it remains unclear why this relationship exists. To address this question, we tested a path model in which repeated experiences of body evaluation (a form of...

A commentary on The sexualized-body-inversion hypothesis revisited: Valid indicator of sexual objectification or methodological artifact? by Schmidt, A. F., and Kistemaker, L. M. (2015). Cognition 134, 77-84. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2014.09.003 Recent objectification research found results consistent with the sexualized body-inversion hypothesis (...

Sexual objectification, the tendency to reduce women to their bodies, body parts, or sexual functions for use by others, has been theorized to set the stage for more severe acts of violence but has been largely absent from the existing sexual victimization literature. The purpose of this study was to explore the role of sexual objectification in me...

Recent studies have shown that sexualized female bodies are objectified at a cognitive level. Research using the body-inversion recognition task, a robust indicator of configural (vs. analytic processing) within cognitive psychology, shows that for sexualized female bodies, people recognize upright and inverted bodies similarly rather than recogniz...

The purpose of this research was to examine the effects of violence on body image variables for college women. Undergraduate women participated in an online study assessing sexual violence (SV), intimate partner violence (IPV), self-objectification, body surveillance, and body shame experiences. Findings suggest that both SV and IPV contribute to w...

The purpose of this investigation was to test a mediation model with cultural orientation, specifically vertical individualism (i.e., perceiving the self as an autonomous individual and accepting inequality) and social comparison predicting sexual objectification perpetration. The present work integrates literatures suggesting that objectification...

A recent study showed that people rely on piecemeal, analytic processing when viewing sexualized female (vs. male) bodies, suggesting that people perceived sexualized female bodies similarly to objects. This paper will examine whether cognitive objectification of sexualized female bodies is associated with a focus on women's body parts rather than...

We applied the message‐learning theory of persuasion to examine perceptions of leaders who confront sexism. Participants (N = 283) read vignettes that varied the confrontation message (i.e., directness), source (i.e., confronter gender), and context (i.e., public vs. private). As hypothesized, female (vs. male) participants evaluated confronters mo...

The purpose of the current investigation was to examine forgiveness and intimate partner violence (IPV) among college women. Undergraduate women (N = 502) participated in an online study in which overall experiences of IPV, as well as experiences of psychological and physical IPV, were investigated with respect to transgression-specific and disposi...

The United States Supreme Court has held that hostile work environment sexual harassment is unwelcome conduct, based on sex, which is “sufficiently severe or pervasive to alter the conditions of employment and create an abusive working environment”. Hostile environments can be extended to other federally protected factors such as race and ethnicity...

People who are in powerful positions (e.g., government officials, employers, parents) often decide how to allocate goods to other people. Indeed, control over resources is precisely one of the things that confers power. This chapter provides a brief overview of distributive justice theory, which deals with fairness standards for allocating some lim...

This research examined how people judge hostile work environments in which members of a work setting derogate other workers because they are older and presumed to be incompetent based on a psycholegal model incorporating negative affect and dehumanization (Wiener, Gervais, Brnjic, & Nuss, 2014). Specifically, we conducted a study in which a nationa...

Objective: This study provided a novel consideration of the relations between alcohol consumption, sexual objectification, and sexual violence, because evidence for the links between sexual objectification and alcohol consumption as well as objectification and sexual violence are almost nonexistent in the published literature. We also developed a m...

Although objectification theory suggests that women frequently experience the objectifying gaze with many adverse consequences, there is scant research examining the nature and causes of the objectifying gaze for perceivers. The main purpose of this work was to examine the objectifying gaze toward women via eye tracking technology. A secondary purp...

The purpose of this study was to examine forgiveness and sexual violence among college women. Undergraduate women (N = 503) completed an online survey assessing experiences of sexual violence and forgiveness. Simultaneous multivariate regressions revealed that experiencing more sexual violence was associated with more revenge and avoidance, and les...

The present paper examined whether power was linked with situated creativity. We proposed that powerful (vs powerless) people engage in creative thought when creativity contributes to contextual goals but avoid creative thought when creativity impedes contextual goals. Extending the Situated Focus Theory of Power (Guinote, 2007a; 2010) to creativit...

We examined reactions to the Race Implicit Association Test (IAT), which has been widely used but rarely examined as an educational tool to raise awareness about racial bias. College students $(N=172)$ were assigned to read that the IAT reflected either personal beliefs or both personal and extrapersonal factors (single vs. multiple explanation c...

Body image concern has long been linked with unhealthy restrained eating patterns among women, yet scant research has examined factors to disrupt this process. At the same time, feminine stereotypes prescribe that women should be small, restrict their movements, speak softly, and limit their food intake (e.g., through dieting). Here, we examined wh...

Objectification and dehumanization represent motivational conundrums because they are phenomena in which people are seen in ways that are fundamentally inaccurate; seeing people as objects, as animals, or not as people. The purpose of the 60th Nebraska Symposium on Motivation was to examine the motivational underpinnings of objectification and dehu...

The current study examined self-objectification and hope in a sample of undergraduate men from a Midwestern university in the United States (N = 227). Specifically, an online survey utilizing self-report measures examined the associations between body surveillance, body shame, trait hope, social relationship hope, and romantic relationship hope wer...

Whereas sexual objectification has most commonly been studied among women, recent calls by counseling psychologists have urged for an extension of objectification research to more fully include men (e.g., Heimerdinger-Edwards, Vogel, & Hammer, 2011). The present study examined the factor structure of the Interpersonal Sexual Objectification Scale (...

Despite the frequency and negative consequences of stranger harassment, only a scant number of studies have explicitly examined stranger harassment and its consequences through the lens of objectification theory. The current study introduced and tested a mediation model in which women’s experiences of stranger harassment may lead to self-objectific...

This study examined intimate partner violence (IPV) and objectification. Specifically, the associations between psychological and physical abuse and self-objectification, body surveillance, and body shame for college women were considered through the lens of objectification theory. Consistent with Hypothesis 1, bivariate correlations showed that mo...

Objectification and (De)humanization brings together a wealth of scholarship from across psychology and the social sciences to illuminate how we understand "human-ness" and to focus on the many ways that those human qualities are minimized--and frequently denied--in others. “They're all alike. I have no use for them. They're not like us-- they're...

The purpose of this research was to empirically examine the fungibility hypothesis derived from sexual objectification theory. Sexual objectification theorists have suggested that like objects, people, typically women, may be fungible or interchangeable with similar others. Despite its provocative nature and potential adverse psychological conseque...

Objectification theory suggests that the bodies of women are sometimes reduced to their sexual body parts. As well, an extensive literature in cognitive psychology suggests that global processing underlies person recognition, whereas local processing underlies object recognition. Integrating these literatures, we introduced and tested the sexual bo...

Each year, thousands of female adolescents run away from home due to sexual abuse, yet they continue to be victims of sexual assault once on the street. To date, few studies have examined how various forms of victimization are related to different types of substance use. The purpose of this article is to investigate the relationship between street...

Social Analytic Jurisprudence instructs researchers to study the reciprocal relations between law and peoples’ lives by developing empirical descriptions of legal assumptions about human behavior. The present work introduced a new experimental paradigm to test some of those assumptions by studying the impact of sexual objectification in a simulated...

In the study reported here, we tested the novel sexualized-body-inversion hypothesis. Integrating research and theory on objectification and person versus object recognition, we examined whether sexualized women, but not sexualized men, are recognized in the same way as objects are. According to objectification theory (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997),...

The purpose of the present research was to examine whether contextual cues related to control contribute to gender differences in math performance that emerge from patronizing behavior. Specifically, in two experiments, men and women received patronizing behavior (i.e., praise paired with a devalued position that did not provide an opportunity for...

This study examined the relation between mindfulness, sexist motivations and beliefs, and prejudice toward women who violate traditional gender roles—namely feminists. In a preliminary study, 672 (251 men, 421 women) undergraduates from a United States Midwestern university completed a measure of mindfulness and warmth toward feminists and consiste...

The sexualization of girls and women has reached extremely high levels in Western culture. Sexualization is a form of prejudice which occurs when 1) a person's value comes from sex appeal, 2) a person's physical attractiveness is equated with sexiness, 3) a person is made into a thing for others' sexual use, or 4) sexuality is imposed on a person....

This research compares prejudice toward female politicians Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin through the lens of role congruity theory. We measured participants’ evaluations of stereotypicality, competence, warmth, and voting likelihood. Consistent with hypotheses, Clinton was evaluated as less stereotypically feminine and less warm than Palin, where...

This research examined the effects of the objectifying gaze on math performance, interaction motivation, body surveillance, body shame, and body dissatisfaction. In an experiment, undergraduate participants (67 women and 83 men) received an objectifying gaze during an interaction with a trained confederate of the other sex. As hypothesized, the obj...

The purpose of this chapter was to integrate social psychological theories of prejudice with considerations of disability laws to shed light on when people with disabilities will experience prejudice and the forms that disability prejudice may take. Drawing on Chapter 7 by M. Selmi (this volume) and Chapter 3 by P. Blanck (this volume), I examined...

This study examined whether relationship orientation was associated positively with confronting sexism and whether confronting sexism was associated positively with competence, self-esteem, and empowerment for women but not men in stereotypically masculine domains. Men and women undergraduates from a United States Midwestern university (n = 165) we...

Members of stigmatized groups frequently find themselves as targets of interpersonal discrimination (e.g., Swim, Hyers, Cohen, & Ferguson, 2001; Swim, Hyers, Cohen, Fitzgerald, & Bylsma, 2003; Swim, Pearson, & Johnston, 2007). Interpersonal discrimination is defined as unfair or derogatory treatment based on social group membership (e.g., sex, race...

Virtual worlds are three-dimensional, computer-generated worlds in which users take the form of avatars and use those avatars to interact with objects and other avatars in the virtual world. Virtual worlds are growing in importance in both educational institutions and businesses. Educational institutions have adopted virtual worlds as a medium for...

Virtual worlds are three-dimensional, computer-generated worlds in which users take the form of avatars. Through their avatars, users can interact with objects and other avatars in the virtual world. Virtual worlds are growing in importance in both educational institutions and businesses. Educational institutions have adopted virtual worlds as a me...

This research tested the hypothesis that the responding of high, but not low, prejudice White Americans would vary as a function of manipulations of powerful people's attention to subordinate strengths that facilitate goal strivings versus weaknesses that block goals. To examine this possibility, White participants were assigned to leader roles and...

This work tested the following hypothesis: When powerful men stereotype their female subordinates in masculine domains, they behave in patronizing ways that affect the performance of their subordinates. Experiment 1 examined the stereotyping tendencies and patronizing behaviors of the powerful. Findings revealed that powerful men who stereotyped th...