PHYSICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL CORRELATES OF SELF-PRESENTATIONAL EXERCISE BEHAVIOR IN WOMEN AEROBICS CLASS PARTICIPANTS

Abstract

1003 As a public activity, aerobics class participation may elicit social physique anxiety (SPA) and self-presentational concerns which may prompt the use of protective self-presentational behaviors such as standing away from view of the instructor and others. The purpose of the current research was to evaluate SPA, body mass index (BMI; kg/m2), and protective self-presentational concerns as predictors of self-presentational exercise behavior. Participants were 134 women enrolled in aerobics classes at a university wellness center who volunteered to complete the Social Physique Anxiety Scale (SPAS) and a questionnaire requesting demographic information, preferences for most and least favored locations for exercising in the aerobics classroom, and reasons for these floor position preferences. Participants were predominately Caucasian (88.2%) with an age range of 18-65. Results of hierarchical multiple regression analyses indicated that neither BMI nor SPAS contributed significantly to the prediction of floor position preferences, but that protective self-presentational reasons for choosing floor position preferences accounted for an additional 24.8% of the variance in most preferred floor position, F (3,131) = 43.33, p < .001, and an additional 30.4% of the variance in least preferred floor position, F (3,128) = 57.18, p < .001, over and above that accounted for by BMI and SPA. Results from this study support a model in which specific self-presentational concerns are more strongly related to self-presentational exercise behavior than more general measures of body shape/size and physique anxiety.