D V Hiller | PubMed Health

PubMed1982

Overweight as master status: a replication.

The study reported here is a replication of an earlier study exploring association of body image with other personality characteristics. In both studies it was predicted that overweight body image would be associated with more negative personality characteristics than normal weight body image, and evidence was found supporting the predictions. In this second study 290 college students were asked to write stories about drawings of normal and overweight males or females and to describe the personalities they created on a personality scale. They were also asked to rank groups of people including overweight and obese persons on a social distance scale. In general the replication supported the findings of the first study.

Attitude↗

PubMed1981

The salience of overweight in personality characterization.

It is argued that the stigma attached to overweight or obesity often causes overweight to operate as a "master status." College students (N = 223) were asked to write stories about male and female stimulus characters who varied only in body image. It was hypothesized that subjects writing about overweight stimulus characters would be more likely than those writing about normal weight characters to (a) write sad or negative stories, (b) create unpleasant characters, and (c) describe their characters with more negative personality characteristics on a semantic differential personality scale. Support was found for part (a) and (b) of the hypothesis but not part (c). The relationships were stronger when the stimulus was a picture than when it was a descriptive paragraph and when the stimulus character was female rather than male. There was indication that female subjects were more likely to associate an overweight body image with an unpleasant personality than were male subjects.

Adult↗