In an experiment by Barbara Fredrickson and colleagues, undergraduate women completed a math test while wearing a swimsuit. While this setup lacked mundane realism—since students rarely take math tests in swimsuits in real life—it demonstrated high psychological realism. The artificial situation successfully triggered the real-world psychological process of self-objectification, which diverted the women's attention and impaired their math performance, demonstrating how laboratory studies can effectively generalize underlying psychological mechanisms even in unusual settings.