Date of Submission

Spring 2019

Academic Programs and Concentrations

Psychology

Project Advisor 1

Sarah Dunphy-Lelii

Abstract/Artist's Statement

In the dichotomy of body and mind, the body has always been viewed as the subordinated, suppressed, and less advantaged counterpart of the mind. Contemporary feminist scholarship has observed the tendency to align women with body and men with mind and sought to critique the use of dualism as a tool of gender oppression. Understanding how people conceptualize the relationship between mind and body and how that affects their attitudes towards men and women is thus an important psychological question. The current research investigated people’s conception of mind and body (Study 1) as well as their explicit and implicit associations between gender and mind/body (Study 2). The results showed that people did not perceive the functions and features of the body and mind to be mutually exclusive (Study 1). Additionally, although people did not associate mind- and body-related words with a particular gender, they held differential beliefs about the relationship women and men had with their body and mind (Study 2). The findings challenged the view of body and mind as separate entities, and expanded our understanding of the links between gender stereotypes and the mind-body dualism.

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On-Campus only

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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