Robyn Trocchio, Texas Christian University – Unveiling the Truth About Body Image with A.I. Technology

The Academic Minute

On Texas Christian University Week: Social media and smartphones can harm body image, but A.I. could help.

Robyn Trocchio, graduate program director and associate professor, explores how.

Dr. Robyn Trocchio is an associate professor of kinesiology and the director of the sport and exercise psychology lab at Texas Christian University. She also serves as the graduate program director. Her research focuses on enhancing human performance and the impact of technology from a psychophysiological perspective within sport and exercise. She is a Certified Mental Performance Consultant and approved mentor through the Association for Applied Sport Psychology. As the co-founder of Trocchio Training, she provides mental performance training for athletes and exercisers of all ages. She received her doctorate in educational psychology with an emphasis in sport and exercise psychology from Florida State University, a master’s in sport and exercise psychology from Barry University, and a bachelor’s in psychology from the University of Florida.

Unveiling the Truth About Body Image with A.I. Technology

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When you look in the mirror, do you like what you see? Body image refers to how you see, think and feel about your own body. Body image dissatisfaction is when you have a negative view of your body, which affects millions of people.

This happens when there’s a difference between how individuals perceive their bodies and their ideal body image. This dissatisfaction is linked to negative self-worth, depression and eating disorders. Traditional methods to measure body image are primarily reliant on questionnaires, but they have limitations.

In this multisite study, Dr. Austin Graybeal and our teams utilized the Amazon Halo app, a smartphone-based AI tool, to measure body composition and create realistic 3D avatars of participants.

This technology allowed individuals to change their personalized avatars to their perceived body, ideal body and the body appearance they thought a partner would find attractive.

We found that women but not men, often saw themselves with less body fat than they actually had. However, both men and women selected lower body fat percentages for their ideal and partner-preferred bodies compared to how they saw themselves.

Body image dissatisfaction was strongly linked to the gap between participants’ ideal image and what they thought a partner would prefer from their perceived image.

Those with a bigger gap tended to worry more about their weight and rated their appearance less favorably.

It’s easy to conceive smartphones as the enemy, but applications like these can impact the issue positively by assisting practitioners to effectively address body image concerns.

Read More:
[ScienceDirect] – Validation of a Novel Perceptual Body Image Assessment Method Using Mobile Digital Imaging Analysis: A Cross-Sectional Multicenter Evaluation in a Multiethnic Sample

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