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A scoping review and index of body stimuli in psychological science

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Abstract

Naturalistic body stimuli are necessary for understanding many aspects of human psychology, yet there are no centralized databases of body stimuli. Furthermore, there are a high number of independently developed stimulus sets lacking in standardization and reproducibility potential, and a general lack of organization, contributing to issues of both replicability and generalizability in body-related research. We conducted a comprehensive scoping review to index and explore existing naturalistic whole-body stimuli. Our research questions were as follows: (1) What sets of naturalistic human whole-body stimuli are present in the literature? And (2) On what factors (e.g., demographics, emotion expression) do these stimuli vary? To be included, stimulus sets had to (1) include human bodies as stimuli; (2) be photographs, videos, or other depictions of real human bodies (not computer generated, drawn, etc.); (3) include the whole body (defined as torso, arms, and legs); and (4) could include edited images, but still had to be recognizable as human bodies. We identified a relatively large number of existing stimulus sets (N = 79) which offered relative variability in terms of main manipulated factors and the degree of visual information included (i.e., inclusion of heads and/or faces). However, stimulus sets were demographically homogenous, skewed towards White, young adult, and female bodies. We identified significant issues in reporting and availability practices, posing a challenge to the generalizability, reliability, and reproducibility of body-related research. Accordingly, we urge researchers to adopt transparent and accessible practices and to take steps to diversify body stimuli.

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Code availability

Not applicable.

Data Availability

Data are publicly available at https://osf.io/mz54e/?view_only=754ad2a7646c4dbebc3b709e9044b3f4.

Notes

  1. OSF does not have a built-in preregistration form for scoping reviews. We used van den Akker et al.’s (2020) Inclusive Systematic Review Registration Form (v0.92) and uploaded a stable PDF before commencing the search.

  2. Headless bodies were included in the review by these inclusion criteria. The choice to include headless bodies was driven both by similarities to analogous situations with naturalistic facial stimuli – which often exclude some facial information or are portrayed as bodiless heads/faces – and by evidence of similar visual processing of bodies with and without heads (e.g., in a recent meta-analysis of the body inversion effected which yielded no summary differences in the inversion effect for headless bodies versus bodies with heads (e.g., Alexi et al., 2019; Griffin & Oswald, 2022).

  3. When coding stimulus clothing, our coding was guided by Griffin and Oswald’s (2022) skin-to-clothing ratio, though we degree of clothing (rather than degree of skin visible) for clarity. Accordingly, minimal clothing referred to bodies which were presented in underwear or swimwear, moderate clothing referred to bodies presented in shorts and tanktops or similar-coverage clothing, and fully clothed referred to bodies presented in trousers and shirts or clothing with more coverage (see Griffin & Oswald, 2022).

  4. We present our results rounded to the nearest whole number for clarity.

  5. A number of papers reported a range of ages rather than a mean age. In those cases, we report the range in Table 1, but for the purposes of this calculation took the median of the range as our estimate.

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  1. Department of Psychology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA

    Flora Oswald

  2. Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA

    Flora Oswald

  3. Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA

    Flora Oswald

  4. Department of Psychology, University of Denver, Denver, CO, USA

    Flora Oswald & Simrat Kaur Samra

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Oswald, F., Samra, S.K. A scoping review and index of body stimuli in psychological science. Behav Res (2023). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-023-02278-z

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