First Name:
Rachel
Last Name:
Chaney
Major Department:
Psychology/Spanish
Thesis Director:
Doris Bazzini
Date of Thesis:
Dec 2009
This thesis examined the effects of various psychoeducational interventions on changing women's perceptions of men's preferences for female body type. Specifically, the goal was to address the often held misconception that men prefer idealistically thin female figures. Female participants were weighed and measured for height, presented with images of thin Caucasian female swimsuit models, and then assigned to one of three conditions: a self-persuasion based disconfirmation, a passage-based disconfirmation, and a no-intervention control group. It was hypothesized that women in the self-persuasion based intervention would exhibit a) more positive mood, as measured by the Profile of Mood States questionnaire-Short Form (POMS-S), b) lower levels of physical appearance state anxiety, as measured by the Physical Appearance State and Trait Anxiety Scale-State (PASTA-S), and c) higher body-esteem, as measured by the Body-Esteem Scale (BES) than women in the other two conditions. However, these predictions were not supported. Overall, scores across measures for participants in the self-persuasion based disconfirmation did not differ significantly from scores of participants in the passage-based intervention and no-intervention groups. Possible improvements and revisions were explored by referring to a similar psychoeducational intervention conducted by Stice et al. (2008a)