Chapman University researchers have conducted a study revealing Asian American women have overall lower evaluations of their attractiveness and body appearance than white women.
The study sampled 303 Asian American women and 367 white women at the University of Hawaii and UCLA on their faces, weight and overall body appearance.
“The study is essentially the measure of how satisfied and comfortable people are with appearance, [and] how attractive they feel,” said David Frederick, assistant professor of psychology at Chapman University and lead author of the study. “Systematically, Asian women would report lower appearance evaluations than white women. So what we wanted to do is to figure out why, because we know their body weights are the same. There was no clear explanation for why that might be.”
The samples were restricted to Asian American women who were either born in the United States or have had long-term residency in order to make certain the comparisons came from two groups exposed to western media and American culture, he said.
The study measured cultural elements of body image satisfaction, how often the women think about how they look to others and how much they compare their appearance to their peers, which did not appear to be significant factors in the results, he added.
“Asian Americans tend to report higher levels of perfectionism than whites, and this was true in our study for three different types of perfectionism – expectations from parents for them to be perfect, criticism from parents and being more concerned about making mistakes,” Frederick said.
“What differentiated the Asian women from the white women were two things: one is that Asian women had an interdependent sense of self, and that was more strongly linked to body dissatisfaction for Asian women than for white women,” he said. “When it comes to interdependent sense of self, it means that you tend to focus more on what social groups you belong to and to put the needs of the group above your own needs.”
Eastern cultures and western cultures diverge in what’s called collectivism. Western culture is focused on empowerment of one’s self identity through individualism, while eastern cultures lean towards collectivism, which focuses on their roles in group-based scenarios, Frederick said. “If you’re someone that’s more sensitive to group norms, then you’re potentially going to be more strongly influenced by media messages and by comments from peers.”
“If your identity is more group based, then you might be more influenced by social norms including appearance norms,” he added. “And so what we found was not only were Asian women higher in interdependent sense of self, but also that was more strongly linked to body dissatisfaction for Asian women than to white women.”
The second revelation, Frederick said, “… Is this difference in overall concern with appearance and attractiveness was really driven by feelings about the face. When it comes to feelings about the body or weight, Asian women and white women didn’t really differ. It was really coming down to Asian women feeling much worse and were much more frequently dissatisfied with their face than white women.”
A third hypothesis, Frederick said, is Asian American women are comparing themselves to two sets of peers and two sets of ideals.
“Asian American women had compared themselves to their ingroup and also to the white outgroup, and so they’re potentially having to live up to two different sets of ideals. And they’re also getting two sets of media ideals. (If they or their parents) have recently immigrated from Asia they’re getting both the Asian media, which will have one set of ideas promoted and then a second set of ideals from the ‘white media,’ the kind of dominant media. They have two sets of impossible ideals to try and look up to,” he said.
Women of all ethnicities are facing some levels of pressure that contribute to dissatisfaction with their bodies, Frederick concluded.
“So what we’re arguing is there’s sort of one additional set of pressures the Asian American women face that the white women aren’t facing and those have to do with both concern about discrimination and prejudice, and the two separate sets of ideals that are coming in, the white norms and the Asian norms that they’re comparing themselves to,” he said.
Contact the writer: cgamboa@ocregister.com
