Abstract
Body dissatisfaction (BD) is a highly prevalent feature amongst females in society, with the majority of individuals regarding themselves to be overweight compared to their personal ideal, and very few self-describing as underweight. To date, explanations of this dramatic pattern have centred on extrinsic social and media factors, or intrinsic factors connected to individuals’ knowledge and belief structures regarding eating and body shape, with little research examining links between BD and basic cognitive mechanisms. This paper reports a correlational study in which visual and executive cognitive processes that could potentially impact on BD were assessed. Visual memory span and self-rated visual imagery were found to be predictive of BD, alongside a measure of inhibition derived from the Stroop task. In contrast, spatial memory and global precedence were not related to BD. Results are interpreted with reference to the influential multi-component model of working memory.
Highlights
Body image is a general term attached to a complex web of constructs by which individuals relate to their own bodies, and in particular to their appearance
The relationships identified are between body dissatisfaction and respectively visual mental imagery and visual short-term memory
These data replicate and considerably extend the results reported by Auchus, Kose & Allen (1993), who described a similar pattern based on an extreme groups analysis whereby the subset of participants who had the most distorted body image representation reported less rich imagery on the VVIQ, but that these groups did not differ in terms of their visual recall
Summary
Body image is a general term attached to a complex web of constructs by which individuals relate to their own bodies, and in particular to their appearance. In western societies the issue of weight (thinness) has been of particular significance for body image, as societal ideals have tended to emphasize unattainable degrees of thinness, especially in females (Tiggemann, 2006). These unrealistic ideals may underlie what has been termed a ‘normative discontent’ (Rodin, Silberstein & Striegel-Moore, 1984). A good deal is already understood about such predictors; factors such as environmental social pressure to be thin, weight-related teasing, internalization of a thin-ideal, lack of social support, individual differences in body mass and peer pressure have all been identified as specific predictors of body dissatisfaction in adolescent girls (Stice & Whitenton, 2002; Presnell, Bearman & Stice, 2004). The picture emerging from this literature is that of a relationship between biases in cognition
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