Body awareness and personality

The relation between personality characteristics and body awareness, defined as the attention paid to different body zones and measured by means of the Fisher Body Focus Questionnaire, is examined in two ways in groups of medical and dental students: (1) Our results replicate fairly well the relation, reported by Fisher, between back and head awareness and anal characteristics. (2) Exploration of the relations between body awareness and descriptive personality characteristics (neuroticism, extraversion, etc.) reveals differences between sexes: in women back awareness correlates positively with neuroticism and negatively with extraversion; in men higher awareness of the right side of the body is related to lower neuroticism but also to higher scores for test-taking attitude and social desirability. Some implications for our understanding of the position of the body and for psychosomatic research are briefly discussed.