- 著者
-
竹内 聡
早野 順一郎
堀 礼子
向井 誠時
- 出版者
- 一般社団法人 日本心身医学会
- 雑誌
- 心身医学 (ISSN:03850307)
- 巻号頁・発行日
- vol.33, no.8, pp.697-703, 1993-12-01 (Released:2017-08-01)
Social pressure for thinness has been emphasized as a cause of recent increase in the prevalence of eating disorders. We have previously found that female junior-high-school students are strongly possessed with their body weight (BW) and body physique and that their self-esteem is associated with their body image. However, only a little fraction of people actually suffer from eating disorders, indicating that individual differences in the reactivity to the social pressure are also important in the etiology of the disease. This study aimed to examine the hypothesis that the BW over'estimation is associated with low self-esteem independently of actual BW in adolescent females. We performed a questionnaire survey on the relationship between self-esteem and body image in 714 students (361 male, 353 female) in an urban coeducational public junior-high-school. The self-esteem was evaluated by means of Kajita's self-esteem scale. The body image was evaluated from the relationship between obesity index and an adjective expression of physique (fat, average, lean) selected by subjects. Based on the relationship between obesity index and adjective expression of physique, subjects were divided into three groups as follow : "over-estimators" were as- signed when "fat" was selected by subjects with an obesity index of < 0% and when "average" was selected by those with an obesity index of < -20% ; in the opposite cases assigned were "under-estimators"; and otherwise "approximate-estimators" were assigned. Additionally, the subjects in "appropriate-estimator" with an obesity index of < 0% were specially defined as "nonover-estimators". Cluster analysis performed on the responses to 23 items of the self-esteem scale showed that the items could be divided into three categories, which were respectively named "self-acceptance", "superiority", and "defense". The appropriate-estimators were 94.7 and 87.8% of male and fe-male students, respectively, whereas the under-estimators were 3.5 and O% and the over-estimators were 1.8 and 12.2%, respectively (p < 0.001). The frequency of over-estimator increased with advancing school grade in the female students (7.l%, 9.6%, and 19.0% for 1 st, 2 nd and 3 rd grade ; p < 0.018), but no significant difference was found in the male students. Analysis focused on the differences between the over- and non-over-estimators in the female subjects revealed that the over-estimators was lower in the self-acceptance score than the non-over-estimators (p=0.022), although no differences was found in the superiority or defense scores. Stepwise discriminant analysis revealed that self-acceptance was a significant discriminator between the two groups even when obesity index and school grade were forced to enter (p < 0.001). These results not only confirm our previous finding that female students desire their BW Iower than medically ideal / BW but also support the hypothesis that low self-acceptance may impair the acceptance of bodyimage and result in the over-estimation of BW in adolescent females.