The Effect of Own Body Concerns on Judgments of Other Women’s Body Size

Frontiers in Psychology

卷:13

Martin J. Tovée¹  Ellis Lowdon¹  Piers Louis Cornelissen¹  Jiří Gumančík¹  Kristofor McCarty¹  Katri K. Cornelissen¹  Lise Gulli Brokjøb²  Kamila R. Irvine³ 

[1] Department of Psychology, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom;

[2] Department of Psychology, UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, Norway;

[3] School of Psychology, College of Social Science, University of Lincoln, Lincolnshire, United Kingdom;

关键词: self-estimated body size;    body image dissatisfaction;    BMI;    anorexia nervosa;    social comparison;    thin ideal;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2022.888904

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

We investigated the relationships between healthy women’s estimates of their own body size, their body dissatisfaction, and how they subjectively judge the transition from normal to overweight in other women’s bodies (the “normal/overweight” boundary). We propose two complementary hypotheses. In the first, participants compare other women to an internalized Western “thin ideal,” whose size reflects the observer’s own body dissatisfaction. As dissatisfaction increases, so the size of their “thin ideal” reduces, predicting an inverse relationship between the “normal/overweight” boundary and participants’ body dissatisfaction. Alternatively, participants judge the size of other women relative to the body size they believe they have. For this implicit or explicit social comparison, the participant selects a “normal/overweight” boundary that minimizes the chance of her making an upward social comparison. So, the “normal/overweight” boundary matches or is larger than her own body size. In an online study of 129 healthy women, we found that both opposing factors explain where women place the “normal/overweight” boundary. Increasing body dissatisfaction leads to slimmer judgments for the position of the “normal/overweight” boundary in the body mass index (BMI) spectrum. Whereas, increasing overestimation by the observer of their own body size shifts the “normal/overweight” boundary toward higher BMIs.

【 授权许可】

Unknown