Psych at Work

I'll admit right away that this post is perhaps best suited for my personal blog because it is, at least in part, heavily inspired by one of my favorite bloggers (whose blog I read for purely personal reasons - check her out, Nora at Walking With Nora wrote about her body image issues here) and my own battles in this arena, but I found myself wondering about the research and analyzing it as a social scientist and thought I might share it here and get some thoughts...

I was thinking about those of us pursuing higher education, those of us in our twenties and how body image issues affect us as we age. I know I had a lot of problems with this in high school and growing up and I've had various health issues my whole life so what's been "healthy" for me has changed dramatically from being smaller than "average" to larger than "average." It's been a struggle and I know I probably could have handled it better, I know I've had some problems that could have benefitted from professional help. But the point I'm making is that I still struggle with it and I think it's unusual. Or at least it's unusual for anyone in their twenties and seeking a post-graduate degree to admit to feeling body issues and insecurities.

I think there's a belief that you outgrow these "adolescent issues" that only plague insecure teens who don't have any real sense of self, any solid identity, any main source of fulfillment. And then, when you are particularly educated, and especially if you are not married, I think there is a general perception that you're an island, that you are the picture of self-esteem because you have to rely on yourself entirely. You draw strength from a career and a career path, you have the guts to follow your dreams and put yourself through some serious underpaid hell to get there. And the idea that you might not love your body? Well, you're too smart to even care about that... body image is a socially constructed ideal created to keep the little woman dependent on her big, strong man and make her feel the need to seek his approval and remain attractive to him. Or something like that (maybe add in a few more big words and ta-da).

But yet, even as we think this, or are told this by well-meaning friends and family who assure us that we are far too intelligent to fall for such ridiculousness, there's evidence that all women are affected. Look at Dove's real woman, love your body type ads and the viral-like success they had - according to this Harvard Business School blogger, that ad campaign increased Dove sales by 600% within 2 months of the launch of the campaign! (Seriously, holy crap, that's a ridiculous statistic...)

And another post from the Brain Blogger recounts a study in which even women with a supposedly healthy body image showed increased brain activity when they were asked to imagine themselves as obese, indicating what the researchers likened to a fear of being fat. The men in the study did not show a comparable spike. Even if the research is flawed and there's a tiny sample size (even for a neuroimaging study) (and not that I'm saying it is, I'm just saying that I haven't investigated it all and that this isn't my area of expertise, but it WAS published in a highly respected journal - Personality and Individual Differences - so it is obviously a fairly well-done study) and researchers can't say for sure that it's any kind of fear or disgust response (as opposed to increased activity in imagining very different versions of themselves or some other reason for the spike), doesn't it suggest that there are fundamental connections between body image and brain activity in women? Which, at least to me, makes it easier to believe that the problem is far reaching and universal - that there may be hard-wired connections that transcend class, education, race, and more. And that's a simultaneously comforting and terrifying thought for me, at least.

So why do people think that you can be too smart to fall for this stuff? Why do we believe we grow out of it when there's evidence that women relate to campaigns with honest depictions of women and admissions of less-than-perfect relationships with their bodies?