Time to Change Your Body, or Perception?

We know little about the everyday health experiences of women in the 1960s and 1970s, when the pattern of their lives changed almost beyond recognition. Mass entry into the workforce, second-wave feminism, declining marriage and birth rates, rising divorce rates, and the development of contraceptive and reproductive technologies meant that women led very different lives to their mothers and grandmothers. How did these shifts alter women’s emotional wellbeing and their relationships to their bodies? This talk will draw on interviews with women born between 1940-1970 to answer these questions.

Following decades of improvements in health and fitness, todays 10-year-olds are officially the first generation to be less fit than their parents were at the same age. The proliferation of sedentary pass-times and pursuits combined with over-protective parents have lead to changes in strength, speed and stamina. Fitness improved in each generation of children born from 1950 to the millenium but today's children really would lose a race against their parents. Generation-by-generation since the 1950s records began that bucks trends in improvement.

Your brain perceives bodies and faces differently to other things in the world. Special areas of your brain are dedicated to ‘seeing’ bodies and faces! But why? How are these special processes related to the way people think and feel about their own bodies? What could this mean for people with body image disturbance? Come along to explore these questions. So get ready, you’ve seen bodies in the mirror, now you’ll see bodies in the brain!