Not Just a Pretty Face: Physical Attractivenessand Perfectionism in the Risk for

Eating Disorders

Caroline Davis,1,2* Gordon Claridge,3 and John Fox4

1 Department of Kinesiology and Health Science, York University,Toronto, Ontario, Canada

2 Department of Psychiatry, The Toronto Hospital and the Faculty of Medicine,University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

3 Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford, England4 Department of Sociology, McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada

Accepted 10 March 1998

Abstract: Objective: Considerable research has examined the correlates and consequencesof both objective and subjective ratings of physical attractiveness. Numerous studies havefound, for example, that subjective physical attractiveness is inversely related to weight anddiet concerns. Surprisingly, however, no research has examined the relationship betweenobjective physical beauty and eating pathologies, despite clinical and theoretical reasons toexpect a positive relationship between the two. Method: We rated 203 young women onfacial attractiveness and obtained self-report measures of perfectionism, neuroticism, andweight preoccupation. Results: Attractiveness was positively related to weight preoccupationafter controlling for body size and neurotic perfectionism. Discussion: These findings providethe first evidence of physical beauty as a risk for disordered eating, and confirm earlierevidence that the relationship between general perfectionism and disordered eating onlyoccurs when combined with a tendency to be anxious and hypercritical. Results are dis-cussed in the context of identity formation and the attractiveness stereotype. © 2000 by JohnWiley & Sons, Inc. Int J Eat Disord 27: 67–73, 2000.

Key words: attractiveness; perfectionism; neuroticism; eating disorders

INTRODUCTION

Prior to the 1960s, the study of appearance was virtually absent from social psycho-logical research. Some have attributed this to the dominant environmentalist philosophy

*Correspondence to: Dr. Caroline Davis, 343 Bethune College, York University, 4700 Keele St., North York,Ontario, M3J 1P3, Canada. E-mail: cdavis@yorku.ca

Contract grant sponsor: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; Contract grant number:410-94-1510

© 2000 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. CCC 0276-3478/00/010067-07

Prod. #1472

of American psychology according to which predicted links between physical—and there-fore implicitly biological—characteristics and psychological outcomes are clearly anti-thetical to a viewpoint that has traditionally been antagonistic to any hint of geneticdeterminism (Berscheid & Walster, 1974). More recently, however, researchers have cometo recognize that aesthetic attractiveness is a useful and important dimension for under-standing certain social phenomena such as impression formation, interpersonal dynamics,and psychological development (Eagly, Ashmore, Makhijani, & Longo, 1991; Feingold,1992; Striegel-Moore & Kearney-Cooke, 1994). Moreover, clinical psychology has alsobeen drawn to the study of appearance-related factors because of a growing awareness of,and interest in, the psychopathology of eating disorders.

Broadly speaking, appearance research has taken two related but essentially indepen-dent forms of enquiry. On the one hand, body image research has examined subjectiveperceptions of, and attitudes to, the size and shape of one’s body. In this area, studies havefound that body dissatisfaction (even after controlling for body weight) is one of thestrongest predictors of disordered eating in clinical and nonclinical research (see Davis,1997b for a review). A second research area has examined the correlates and consequencesof physical attractiveness as an objectively rated construct (see Berscheid & Walster, 1974;Feingold, 1992 for reviews). In some respects, the findings are rather unexpected , evencounterintuitive. For example, while high interrater reliabilities are achieved in objectiveratings of other’s physical attractiveness, the relationship between objective and subjec-tive assessments is remarkably small (Feingold, 1992).

It is also interesting that although several socially desirable characteristics such aswarmth and intelligence are more often ascribed to attractive than unattractive people(Dion, 1986), no notable relationships between objective physical attractiveness ratingsand subjects’ self-ratings on these traits have been found (Feingold, 1992). On the otherhand, a number of characteristics related to social behavior have shown associations withobjective physical attractiveness. For example, attractive individuals tend to report lessloneliness and social anxiety although they do experience a greater degree of publicself-consciousness.

When one considers the totality of physical attractiveness research, a surprising obser-vation is the absence of any research investigating associations between objective physicalattractiveness and eating-related pathologies, given the strong links between subjectiveratings and the latter (Davis, 1997b). It was our intention, therefore, to investigate thisrelationship for the first time in a group of young women. Specifically, the present studywas designed to test our prediction that weight and diet concerns would be greater inbeautiful women than in their less attractive counterparts. The formulation of this hy-pothesis was based in part on clinical observation, and partly on theory. In the firstinstance, it has been our impression, based on a number of years of experience witheating-disordered patients, that adolescents with these disorders are, as a group, of aboveaverage attractiveness. In fact, the observation has been so consistent over time that we arepersuaded to reject the idea of chance.

From a theoretical perspective, there are some reasonable explanations. For example,evidence indicates that in general, girls are praised more for physical appearance andboys for physical functioning such as athletic skills (Striegel-Moore & Kearney-Cooke,1994). If we go one step further and assume that physically attractive girls are even morelikely to be complimented on their appearance than less attractive girls, then the formermay learn to (over)value their physical attributes, and consequently invest a greaterdegree of their overall self-worth in matters related to their appearance.

It is also reasonable to suppose that physical appearance has its effects on weight

68 Davis, Claridge, and Fox

preoccupation against the background of other personality factors. Here research hasparticularly emphasized the important role of neuroticism and perfectionism, a set oftraits that we believe is very relevant to understanding how physical attractiveness comesto play a part in the etiology of the eating disorders (Blatt, 1995; Davis, 1997a; Kaye, 1997).As a general principle, neurotically perfectionistic individuals will tend to set themselvesexcessively high, and often unattainable, standards in whatever goals help them toachieve and to continue validating their self-esteem. This will be no less true wherephysical beauty is the main source of self-regard. The present study sought to investigatethe combined role of beauty and perfectionism in predicting weight preoccupation amongyoung women. This hypothesis was tested using structural equation modeling.

METHOD

Subjects and Procedure

Female university students (n = 203, mean age = 21.22 years, s = 2.66) took part in thestudy. All testing was done individually in a laboratory setting. The questionnaire pack-age was completed first and then height and weight were taken.

Measurements

1. Weight preoccupation (WP) was assessed by a sum of the 23 items of the Drivefor Thinness, Body Dissatisfaction, and Bulimia subscales of the Eating Disor-der Inventory (EDI; Garner & Olmsted, 1984).

2. Normal perfectionism was assessed by the 15-item Self-Oriented Perfectionism(SOP) subscale of the Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale (Hewitt & Flett,1989), items that reflect the positive or adaptive aspects of perfectionism (Frost,Heimberg, Holt, Mattia, & Neubauer, 1993; Terry-Short, Owens, Slade, &Dewey, 1995).

3. Neurotic perfectionism was assessed by the 42-item Neurotic PerfectionismScale (NPQ; Mitzman, Slade, & Dewey, 1994) designed to reflect the specificattitudes and experiences of maladaptive perfectionism thought to be linked toeating disorders.

4. Neuroticism was assessed by the 24-item N scale of the Eysenck PersonalityQuestionnaire-Revised (Eysenck & Eysenck, 1991).

5. Facial attractiveness (FA) was rated on a scale from 1 to 10 (in increments of0.5) by the research assistant conducting the study, a young woman similar inage to the subjects in the study. She was instructed to make her assessment assoon as the subject entered the laboratory, before any interaction had takenplace, and cautioned that her judgment should not be influenced by the slen-derness or fatness of the participant’s body shape. Subjects were unaware thatattractiveness ratings were being made. The rater was also unaware of thespecific study hypotheses.1

6. Body mass index (BMI; weight [kg]/height [m2]) was calculated from mea-sured weight and height.

1 Although this study used only one rater, research has shown that interrater reliability is very high whenmore than one rater is used (Berscheid & Walster, 1974; Feingold, 1992).

Not Just a Pretty Face 69

RESULTS

Variable means and standard deviations are presented in Table 1.

Structural Equation Analysis

The single-headed arrows connecting variables represent direct effects (see Figure 1).Accordingly, N and SOP are specified to affect NPQ directly and FA, BMI, and NPQ arespecified to affect WP directly.2 The multiheaded arrows at the left represent unanalyzedassociations among the exogenous variables in the model — N, SOP, FA, and BMI. Thetwo sourceless arrows pointing to the endogenous variables, NPQ and WP, representerrors in these variables. The model is overidentified because of the absence of predicteddirect effects linking N and SOP to WP, and FA and BMI to NPQ. Therefore, insofar as Nand SOP influence WP, for example, it is through NPQ.

Estimated structural coefficients (regression coefficients) and their standard errors ap-pear in Table 2. Note that all of the specified effects are highly statistically significant. Thefirst structural equation accounts for more than 60% of the variation in NPQ, the secondequation for nearly a third of the variation in WP. Moreover, the model accounts well forthe covariational pattern of the data: The goodness-of-fit and adjusted goodness-of-fitindices are, respectively, 0.992 and 0.942; and the overidentification x2 test statistic (a testof lack of fit) is 5.95 with 4 df, for which p = 0.20.

DISCUSSION

A wealth of data confirms that in the eyes of the beholder, more favorable personalitytraits, and more successful life outcomes, are typically ascribed to physically attractiveindividuals (Dion, Berscheid, & Walster, 1972; Eagly et al., 1991; Feingold, 1992). It isironic therefore that beauty may also exact a considerable toll from women who are soendowed. This is especially so in our current culture, which is obsessed with the pursuitof bodily perfection (Brownell, 1991). As we predicted, the attractive women in our studyreported a significantly greater degree of weight preoccupation (after partialling out the

2 WP has been square-root transformed to stabilize the error variance and normalize the distribution of theresiduals.

Table 1. Means, standard deviations, and mimima and maxima for all variables used inthe analyses

Variable M SD Minimum Maximum

Weight preoccupation 16.74 14.80 0.00 60.00Normal perfectionism 71.81 15.78 29.00 102.00Neurotic perfectionism 111.57 28.79 48.00 192.00Neuroticism 14.05 5.16 2.00 24.00Facial attractiveness 6.17 1.30 3.50 9.50Body mass index 22.14 4.03 16.23 45.92

70 Davis, Claridge, and Fox

effects of body size) than did their less attractive counterparts. At this point, however,explanations must rely largely on speculation.

It is reasonable to assume that attractive children are more likely than those who areless attractive to be admired for their physical attributes. Children are also more likely tomold their self-identities according to values reinforced and internalized from an earlyage. In the course of normal development, they are also likely to distinguish goals that aremore easily within their grasp from those that are largely unattainable (Cramer, 1995).Therefore, an attractive young girl may be more likely than one who is unattractive toidentify with, and aspire to, the cultural ideal of female sexual attractiveness. Indirectsupport for this notion comes from two recent studies. In the first, it was found that theadoption of idols associated with beauty and the perfect body (e.g., successful fashionmodels) was positively correlated with eating problems in a population of adolescentfemales (Wichstrom, 1995). A second study found that time watching television programsthat showed women in stereotyped roles (like music videos and soaps) was associatedwith greater body dissatisfaction, although the subjects in the sample had relatively lowbody weights (Tiggemann & Pickering, 1996).

Our findings are particularly interesting in light of the evidence that subjective ratingsof physical attractiveness are inversely related to weight preoccupation (Fallon, 1990) and

Table 2. Estimated structural coefficients

Dependent Variable: NQP Dependent Variable: WP

IndependentVariable Coefficient

StandardError p*

IndependentVariable Coefficient

StandardError p

Constant 25.645 6.308 Constant −4.720 0.967N 3.799 0.255 .0001 FA 0.218 0.083 .0095SOP 0.452 0.083 .0001 BMI 0.217 0.027 .0001

NPQ 0.021 0.004 .0001R2 .608 R2 .322

Note: NQP = Neurotic Perfectionism Scale; WP = Weight Preoccupation; SOP = Self-Oriented Perfectionism.*Two-tail p value.

Figure 1. Recursive structural equation model for the Neurotic Perfectionism Scale and WeightPreoccupation.

Not Just a Pretty Face 71

that this relationship cannot be explained by a common association with depression(McGovern, Neale, & Kendler, 1996). Perhaps the crucial factor determining dysfunctionalattitudes is the discrepancy between others’ and one’s own judgment of personal attrac-tiveness. Even women who, by general consensus, are considered beautiful may havepoor self-esteem if they unaccountably refuse to believe what others say or find reasonsto deny it, for example, by focusing unduly on some trivial part of their appearance. Usinga design similar to the one described here, it would be of interest to compare subjectivelyand objectively rated physical attractiveness in connection to weight preoccupation in thesame group of individuals.

As expected, results of the structural equation analysis indicated that neuroticism andgeneral perfectionism were positively associated with the maladaptive aspects of perfec-tionism which, in turn, strongly influenced weight preoccupation. These findings agreewith earlier evidence that perfectionism on its own does not appear to be a risk factor foreating disorders. Problems are more likely to arise when high personal strivings arecombined with a tendency to be anxious and hypercritical (Davis, 1997a; Slade & Dewey,1986).

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