A group of women in a new study seemed unlikely to have body image issues – at least their responses on a tried-and-true psychological screening presented no red flags. That assessment changed when Brigham Young University researchers used MRI technology to observe what happened in the brain when people viewed images of complete strangers.

If the stranger happened to be overweight and female, it surprisingly activated in women's brains an area that processes identity and self-reflection. Men did not show signs of any self-reflection in similar situations.

"These women have no history of eating disorders and project an attitude that they don't care about body image," said Mark Allen, a BYU neuroscientist（神经系统科学家） . "Yet under the surface is an anxiety about getting fat and the centrality（向心性，中央） of body image to self."

Allen makes his report with grad student Tyler Owens and BYU psychology professor Diane Spangler in the May issue of the psychological journal Personality and Individual Differences.

Spangler and Allen collaborate（合作，勾结） on a long-term project to improve treatment of eating disorders by tracking progress with brain imaging. When anorexic（厌食的） and bulimic（贪食的） women view an overweight stranger, the brain's self-reflection center – known as the medial prefrontal cortex（前额皮质） – lights up in ways that suggest extreme unhappiness and in some cases, self-loathing（厌恶的） .

The motivation for this new study was to establish a point of reference among a control group of women who scored in the healthy range on eating disorder diagnostic tests. Surprisingly, even this control group exhibited what Allen calls "sub-clinical" issues with body image.

Seeing that, Allen and Owens ran the experiments with a group of men for comparison.

"Although these women's brain activity doesn't look like full-blown eating disorders, they are much closer to it than men are," Allen said.

Spangler says women are bombarded with（连续提出，用……轰击） messages that perpetuate（使不朽，保持） the thin ideal, and the barrage（弹幕，拦河坝） changes how they view themselves.

"Many women learn that bodily appearance and thinness constitute（组成，构成） what is important about them, and their brain responding reflects that," Spangler said. "I think it is an unfortunate and false idea to learn about oneself and does put one at greater risk for eating and mood disorders."

"It's like the plant in my office," she continued."It has the potential to grow in any direction, but actually only grows in the direction ofthe window – the direction that receives the most reinforcement."