The role of appearance comparison and body dissatisfaction in influencing passability judgements across body and non-body apertures in VR

Body dissatisfaction, a core feature of body image disturbance (BID), is prevalent among women both with and without eating disorders. Recently, research has demonstrated that individuals with BIDs show alterations in the body schema, a sensorimotor representation essential for movement and action planning. For example, individuals with BIDs overestimate their body size when judging whether they can pass through doorways in an environment. Body dissatisfaction has been closely linked to appearance comparison, particularly in social contexts where other bodies are present. As such, this study investigates whether the presence of other bodies influences body schema distortions in women with high and low body dissatisfaction. Participants (N = 357) were recruited via online questionnaires measuring appearance comparison, motor imagery ability, body dissatisfaction, and interoceptive sensibility. Participants with high (N = 33) and low (N = 31) body dissatisfaction completed a passability judgement task in a virtual reality environment, estimating whether they could pass through apertures formed either by two women (body apertures) or by two poles (non-body apertures). Passability estimates did not differ significantly between groups. However, women with low body dissatisfaction showed greater precision when judging body apertures than non-body apertures. In contrast, women with high body dissatisfaction showed similar precision across both aperture types. Additionally, passability precision was associated with higher levels of appearance comparison and lower interoceptive trust. These findings suggest that body dissatisfaction and appearance comparison may influence the precision with which women mentally represent and estimate the space their bodies occupy.