Understanding the impact of stress and social influences on body image, health, and psychological well-being

Social interactions and evaluation are a consistent predictor of an individual’s health and psychological well-being and are closely linked to stress. My research has demonstrated how social interactions and evaluation may impact body perceptions and well-being in a number of different contexts. First, engaging in social comparison practices and negative social exchanges exacerbated the associations between body perceptions and health-related outcomes, such as cortisol stress responses and disordered eating. Second, older women’s social interactions may be influenced by social norms and cues that indicate that women’s social value decreases with age. Third, I extended this work and showed that ethnic minority women’s engagement with members of the dominant group impacts body perceptions and health behaviors. The broader implications of the findings demonstrate that individuals’ identity, self worth, and psychological well-being need to be examined in the social contexts that produce the evaluative judgments and interactions prescribed by social roles, and that stress plays a role in understanding the links between social experiences, body perceptions, and well-being.