Assessing Women’s Negative Commentary on Their Own Bodies

Abstract

Our article details the development of the self-report Negative Body Talk (NBT) scale and five studies (all conducted with samples of U.S. undergraduate women) supporting the psychometric soundness of scores on this measure. The NBT scale measures women's tendency to engage in negatively valenced commentary about the weight and shape of their own bodies (including upward comparisons that comprise implicit negative commentary) when speaking with others. Two subscales were identified using a combination of exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. The body concerns subscale assesses women's tendency to make comments expressing worries over the size/shape of their bodies. The body comparison subscale assesses women's tendency to vocalize unfavorable comparisons of their body with the bodies of other women. Scores on the NBT scale demonstrated strong internal consistency and moderate test-retest reliability with these samples of U.S. college women. Evidence of convergent, discriminant, and incremental validity is presented. The NBT scale may be useful in the growing body of research examining how the social norm of women expressing body dissatisfaction in conversation with others both reflects and fuels body image disturbance in women.

Negative body talk as an outcome of friends’ fitness posts on social networking sites: body surveillance and social comparison as potential moderators

“…The current research explores 'negative body talk' (Engeln-Maddox, Salk, & Miller, 2012) as an outcome of friends' fitness posts on SNSs, as well as whether this relationship is moderated by body surveillance and social comparison. Negative body talk is conceptualized as a social process whereby individuals make self-focused and negatively valenced comments about their own body and appearance (e.g.…”

“…Negative body talk is conceptualized as a social process whereby individuals make self-focused and negatively valenced comments about their own body and appearance (e.g. 'I think I'm getting fat', Engeln-Maddox et al, 2012). This sort of talk is also referred to 'fat talk' in the extant literature (see Nichter, 2000), but negative body talk expands upon and differs from fat talk in that it acknowledges that all fat talk comments do not have to explicitly mention or revolve around being fat per se (e.g.…”

The Body Project: A Narrative and Social Network Analysis

“…Experimental manipulations of fat talk have replicated pathogenic effects suggested by correlational studies (Katrevich, Register, & Aruguette, 2014;Salk & Engeln-Maddox, 2012;Stice, Maxfield, & Wells, 2003). For example, Stice, Maxfield, and Wells (2003) created an experimental situation in which a researcher confederate expressed body discontent and weight loss intentions directly in front of a research participant.…”

“…Instead fat talk appears to be a unique pathogenic contributing cause of body dissatisfaction (Salk & Engeln-Maddox, 2012).…”

“…In order to increase the diversity of participant BMI in the interview sample, BMI was added as a criterion of consideration for interview selection. Salk, & Miller, 2012) were considered high-risk. Table 3 presents the risk score cut offs from the sample utilized for interview selection beside the mean from the sample of participants who were both eligible and completed the intervention.…”