First Impressions and Body Image

First impressions count; beauty is only skin deep; don’t judge a book by its cover; or we might hear that a certain politician has charisma, whatever that means. Body image is very much talked about but what does psychology say about body image and how does body image affect our health and fitness?

There are several perspectives of personality and behaviour; however when we are talking about processing of imagery, the Evolutionary Perspective of personality can be compared with actual brain imagery. Firstly, have you ever noticed that dogs are very good at catching tennis balls? This is because dogs only see in black and white; hence they can process movement very quickly. Humans have colour vision and that slows down our reaction time. Also processing colour image needs a larger brain and a larger brain needs a lot of energy to operate. In evolutionary terms it is very expensive to have a brain.

So what are the evolutionary advantages of having colour vision over say a better sense of smell? Ten thousand years ago on the plains of Africa, which is really yesterday in evolutionary terms, humans we able to defeat the camouflage strategy of other animals.  So when a human saw glimpse of coloured fur in the underbrush the human was able to detect whether the animal was prey or predator. Sure a dog’s sense of smell is very sensitive but if the dog is downwind of another animal its sense of smell is defeated. However as this judgement between predator or prey had to be made quickly humans became to rely on first impressions. So the bad news is that we are genetically programmed to judge things on very little visual information. We very much rely on first impressions.

There is some good news. Humans are much more attuned to danger than to reward, after all if a hunter was to mistake an antelope as a lion and runs way he is missing out on a meal. However if the hunter mistakes a lion as an antelope then he is the meal. So by simply smiling at someone and saying there name you are going a long way to creating a good impression. Secondly, in most situations first impressions fade and humans begin to process other information.

The bad news is that we humans worry too much about the impressions we make. Because we are wearing a shirt that might be a little creased or because we have some other minor blemish we withdraw within ourselves and we disengage with other people. Hence, ironically, we end up not providing other people with the information they need to make a more informed decision about who we are.

How does this all apply to health and fitness? Firstly we unduly stress ourselves about the image we are presenting to other people. Some people might feel uncomfortable exercising in gyms, we are always comparing ourselves to other people in the gym. Our evolutionary adaptive behaviour of looking out for danger from all quarters has become maladaptive in our modern world; we are looking out for threats that are just not there. In the next few blogs I will outline some simple strategies on how to avoid these evolutionary pitfalls.