Self-Face Perception in Men With Elevated Body Dysmorphic and Muscle Dysmorphia Symptoms: Subjective Recognition...

Self-face perception, including recognising one's face as one's own and evaluating its appearance, is important to physical self-concept. Yet how body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) and muscle dysmorphia (MD) symptoms relate to these processes remains underexplored, particularly in men. This study examined how self-face recognition accuracy and self-face appearance evaluations are influenced by the severity of BDD and MD symptoms in men.

Sixty-eight male participants (M_age = 22.6 years, SD = 3.5; White and East/Southeast Asian) from the community performed a self-face recognition task during which their faces were digitally morphed with an unfamiliar male face, providing an index of objective self-face recognition sensitivity. Participants also completed measures of BDD and MD symptomatology, subjective self-face recognition difficulty, and self-face evaluations (attractiveness, adiposity, and dissatisfaction).

Higher levels of BDD symptoms and MD-related appearance intolerance symptoms were associated with greater subjective self-face recognition difficulty and more negative self-face evaluations (lower attractiveness, greater dissatisfaction). Neither symptom dimension predicted objective self-face recognition sensitivity or perceived facial adiposity.

These findings reveal a theoretically informative dissociation: men with higher levels of BDD and MD symptoms experience greater subjective self-recognition difficulties and negatively biased facial appearance evaluations despite intact objective self-recognition performance. This pattern suggests that self-face disturbances in BDD and MD may reflect cognitive-affective biases rather than perceptual abnormalities, at least at non-clinical severity levels. Future research in clinical samples is needed to determine whether perceptual deficits emerge at higher symptom severity and establish causality.