Poor Body Image and Young Girls
A poor body Image seems to be the norm in our western society today. A poor body image leads to many complications for young women including a number of life threatening mental disorders. Surprisingly, the negative effects of poor body images are shown in extremely young girls. In Jennifer Harriger, Rachel Calogero, David Witherington, and Jane Ellen Smiths article, "Body Size Stereotyping and Internalization of the Thin Ideal," they discuss their experiment that tryed to answer the question of when women accept the positive socialized attributes of being thin, and then use this to measure their own self-worth.
They conducted a study of 55 girls between the ages of 3-5, the first test they were given a piece of paper with three women that were identical except for weight (only A, D, and G were used in this study), the children were then asked a series of questions such as "point to the girl you think is...nice," (smart, neat, ugly etc). In the second study they let the children choose to either play candy land of chutes and latters, and then they chose which game piece to use, the pieces were changed to identical women figurines, except with different weights (thin, average, big).
The results of the experiment conclude that the young girls attributed negative comments to the larger women, and the positive comments to the thinner women. Even in girls that are as young as 3 believe that thin women have better qualities, this could lead to poor body image in oneself later in life.
Reference:
Harriger, J., Calogero, R., Witherington, D., & Smith, J. (2010). Body size stereotyping and internaliztion of the thin ideal in preschool girls. Sex Roles, (64), 609-620. Retrieved from Academic Search Premier on November 28th, 2012.
http://web.ebscohost.com.silk.library.umass.edu/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=e97100e6-70d8-41ea-bb82-ecf0cbc92e15%40sessionmgr10&vid=5&hid=7
-Lindsey
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