Jean M. Lamont, Ph.D.
Improving Body Responsiveness and Health Using a Compassionate
Body Scan: A Report of Work on a Faculty Development Fellowship
Body shame, a negative self-conscious response to not meeting
cultural body ideals, predicts poor health decisions. This relationship is
mediated by deficits in body responsiveness, or the detection and valuing of
internal bodily functions. Thus, increasing body responsiveness may interrupt
the relationship between body shame and poor health decisions. One way to
increase body responsiveness may be through a compassionate body scan (CBS), a
meditation practice in which individuals attend to their bodies with the loving
kindness they may show a friend. Because such scans have not been tested in a
short experimental format, I developed and prepared a brief CBS and identified
two comparison tasks for use in experiments. In a pilot, CBS predicted improved
body responsiveness but not more so than control. Moreover, pretest body
responsiveness predicted health decisions better than posttest body
responsiveness. Future directions include developing appropriate control groups
and examining the role of trait body responsiveness.