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Poster #215 - The Effects of Multiple Sources of Pressure for Thinness on Early Adolescent Girls’ Body Image

Thu, March 21, 4:00 to 5:15pm, Baltimore Convention Center, Floor: Level 1, Exhibit Hall B

Integrative Statement

For many girls and women, adolescence is a time of intense pressure to achieve or maintain a thin body (Stice & Whitenton, 2002). Messages from loved ones, including parents, and from media are often implicated as sources of these pressures (Stice, 1998) and have been found to predict negative body image outcomes for older adolescent girls. However, less is known about the extent to which early adolescent girls experience pressures from these sources, and how pressures from multiple sources may predict early body image disturbances. The current study focuses on perceived pressure from mothers and from media and whether or not these sources of pressure predict heightened body dissatisfaction for early adolescent girls. We hypothesized that daughters who reported experiencing both sources of pressure would also report higher levels of body dissatisfaction compared to girls who experienced only one source of pressure or no pressure.
Participants were 67 middle school girls (Mage = 11.93, SD = .84) participating with their mothers as part of a larger study on mother-daughter relationships. Daughters responded to a 9-item measure of perceived pressure from mom to lose weight. Perceived pressure for thinness from the media was assessed via the media pressures subscale of the Sociocultural Attitudes Toward Appearance Questionnaire, version 4 (SATAQ-4; Thompson et al., 2011), and daughters’ body dissatisfaction was assessed with the body dissatisfaction subscale of the Eating Disorders Inventory (EDI-3; Garner, 1983). We used multiple regression to test for interaction effects.
Results indicated that on average, girls reported experiencing some pressure from mom to lose weight (M = 15.76, SD = 5.29), and from media (M = 11.34, SD = 4.82). We found a significant interaction between girls’ reports of perceived pressures from the media to be thin and perceived pressure from mothers to lose weight, B = .09, ΔF(1, 61) = 7.53, p < .01, indicating that girls who reported high levels of pressure from moms to lose weight showed higher body dissatisfaction if they had also experienced pressure from thin-ideal messages found in media. These findings replicate previous work addressing risk factors for body image disturbance and disordered eating development and further extend those findings to early adolescence. Further, these findings highlight potential avenues of intervention targeting parenting behaviors that may increase risk of negative body image outcomes for adolescent girls.

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