Abstract
The present study examined the associations among biased attentional responding to thin-ideal bodies, appearance comparisons, eating disorder-specific rumination, and body dissatisfaction. Sixty-seven females completed an attentional task capable of independently assessing biased attentional engagement with, and biased attentional disengagement from, images of thin-ideal bodies relative to images of non-thin bodies. Self-report measures of the other relevant constructs were also taken. Results revealed that a heightened tendency to engage in appearance comparisons was predicted by increased attentional engagement with thin-ideal bodies but not by impaired attentional disengagement from thin-ideal bodies. Moreover, a serial mediation analysis revealed that increased attentional engagement with thin-ideal bodies was associated with greater appearance comparison, which in turn was associated with greater eating disorder-specific rumination and consequently greater body dissatisfaction. The current findings suggest that increased attentional engagement with thin-ideal bodies might represent a pathway to body dissatisfaction, mediated by greater appearance comparison and eating-disorder specific rumination.
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Data Availability
The original dataset associated with this work can be found in the following Open Science Framework data deposit: https://osf.io/k6qzx/.
Notes
In the context of the current study, the term “non-thin” describes bodies estimated to be in the overweight/mildly obese weight range.
Overall level of accuracy for each of these three participants fell below 55%.
A post-hoc Monte Carlo power simulation (Schoemann, Boulton, & Short, 2017) revealed that the current study had 80% power [CI .79–.82] to detect the observed serial mediation effect.
A variation of the proposed serial mediation pathway, in which the order of the mediators was reversed, did not yield a serial mediation effect (β = .05, SE = .05, 95% CI = −.04, .18).
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Authorship
Laura Dondzilo: Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal analysis, Writing - original draft & editing. Julian Basanovic: Methodology, Writing - review & editing. Ben Grafton: Methodology, Writing - review & Editing. Jason Bell: Methodology & Resources. Georgia Turnbull: Data collection. Colin MacLeod: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing - review & editing. All authors approved the final version of the paper for submission.
Funding
This research was partly supported by Australian Research Council grants DP170104533 and FL170100167.
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Ethical approval for this study was given by the University of Western Australia’s Human Research Ethics Committee.
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Dondzilo, L., Basanovic, J., Grafton, B. et al. A serial mediation model of attentional engagement with thin bodies on body dissatisfaction: The role of appearance comparisons and rumination. Curr Psychol 42, 1896–1904 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-021-01574-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-021-01574-1