2014/10/20 by Caroline Huxley, Emma Halliwell, Victoria Clarke · 1 citation
Psychology · Arts and Humanities · Business, Management and Accounting · #Eating Disorders and Behaviors #Fashion and Cultural Textiles #Consumer Behavior in Brand Consumption and Identification #Psychology #Lesbian #Developmental psychology #Romance #Sociocultural evolution #Social psychology #Disordered eating #Human physical appearance #Eating disorders #Clinical psychology
paper · doi:10.1177/0361684314554917
openalex publication_date 2014/10/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
According to the tripartite influence model of body image, appearance pressures from family, friends, partners, and the media lead to body dissatisfaction and restrained eating behaviours. There is strong support for this model among young, White heterosexual women. Evidence suggests that women who identified as lesbian as bisexual (LB) may be protected from sociocultural pressures around thinness, but no known research has tested the tripartite model among LB women. The current research tests this model with 264 heterosexual and 208 LB adult women. Heterosexual women reported more thin-ideal internalization than LB women. For both groups of women, pressures from the media, male romantic partners, and family were most strongly associated with weight satisfaction and thin-ideal internalization. However, the impact of these pressures differed for the two groups; the heterosexual women’s model included significant pathways from these pressures to weight satisfaction and restrained eating, which were not significant for the LB women. Differences also emerged between our findings and previous research with younger women; pressure from friends was not related to body image in the model for either group. These findings suggest that further research is needed to explore how diverse groups of women experience sociocultural pressures around thinness.