Stephen Ian D, Perera A Treshi-Marie
University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus, Semenyih, Selangor, Malaysia.
PLoS One. 2014 Jan 20;9(1):e86302. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0086302. eCollection 2014.
Recent research has shown facial adiposity (apparent weight in the face) to be a significant predictor of both attractiveness and health, thus making it an important determinant of mate selection. Studies looking at the relationship between attractiveness and health have shown that individuals differentiate between the two by preferring a lower weight for attractiveness than for health in female faces. However, these studies have either been correlational studies, or have investigated weight perceived from only the face. These differences have been discussed with regard to sociocultural factors such as pressure from parents, peers and also media, which has been seen to have the highest influence. While exposure to media images has been shown to influence women's own-body image, no study has yet directly tested the influence of these factors on people's preferred weight in other women's bodies. Here we examine how a short exposure to images of models influences men's and women's judgments of the most healthy looking and attractive BMI in Malaysian Chinese women's bodies by comparing differences in preferences (for attractiveness and health) between groups exposed to images of models of varying attractiveness and body weight. Results indicated that participants preferred a lower weight for attractiveness than for health. Further, women's but not men's preferred BMI for attractiveness, but not health, was influenced by the type of media images to which they were exposed, suggesting that short term exposure to model images affect women's perceptions of attractiveness but not health.
近期研究表明，面部肥胖（面部的表观重量）是吸引力和健康状况的重要预测指标，因此成为配偶选择的一个重要决定因素。研究吸引力与健康之间关系的结果显示，在女性面孔方面，个体在两者之间存在区分，即认为具有吸引力的体重低于健康所需的体重。然而，这些研究要么是相关性研究，要么仅调查了从面部感知到的体重。这些差异已结合社会文化因素进行了讨论，如来自父母、同龄人以及媒体的压力，其中媒体被认为影响最大。虽然接触媒体形象已被证明会影响女性自身的身体形象，但尚无研究直接测试这些因素对人们对其他女性身体中理想体重的影响。在此，我们通过比较接触不同吸引力和体重的模特形象的组之间在偏好（吸引力和健康方面）的差异，研究短暂接触模特形象如何影响男性和女性对马来西亚华裔女性身体中最健康和最具吸引力的身体质量指数（BMI）的判断。结果表明，参与者认为具有吸引力所需的体重低于健康所需的体重。此外，女性（而非男性）对吸引力（而非健康）的理想BMI受到她们所接触的媒体形象类型的影响，这表明短期接触模特形象会影响女性对吸引力的认知，但不会影响对健康的认知。
