Looking Good, Sounding Good: Femininity Ideology and Adolescent Girls' Mental Health

By D. Tolman, E. Impett, A. Tracy, A. Michael. 2006

202 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This study used a feminist psychodynamic developmental framework to test the hypothesis that internalizing conventional femininity ideologies in two domains—inauthenticity in relationships and body objectification—is associated with early adolescent girls' mental health. One hundred forty-eight eighth-grade girls completed measures of femininity ideology, self-esteem, depression, and demographic characteristics. In the first part of this study, we refined the Adolescent Femininity Ideology Scale originally developed by Tolman and Porche (2000). In the second part, we used structural equation modeling to test models linking femininity ideology to mental health. Results revealed that body objectification, and to a lesser extent, inauthenticity in relationships, accounted for half of the variance in depression and over two-thirds of the variance in self-esteem in a critical period of development for adolescent girls. The importance of a feminist psychodynamic developmental framework for identifying and understanding salient dimensions of female adolescence is discussed.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Gender Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/495fc03a6b0cc7aa0060188ae1352c5c1bbd0901

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Citations in the corpus

Femininity Ideology and Sexual Health in Young Women: A focus on Sexual Knowledge, Embodiment, and Agency (2011, background): “Traditional femininity ideologies emphasize women’s passivity, compliance, concern for others, and agreeableness (Amaro, 1995; Fox, 1977; Tolman et al., 2006).”
Objectification Theory Predicts College Women’s Attitudes Toward Cosmetic Surgery (2010, background): “Specifically, self-esteem has been negatively associated with experiences of sexual objectification (American Psychological Association Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls 2007; Tylka and Subich 2004), self-objectification and self-surveillance (Aubrey 2006; Mercurio and Landry 2008; Tolman et ”
Objectification Theory and Psychology of Women: A Decade of Advances and Future Directions (2008, background): “…of adolescent girls found that self-objectification was uniquely linked with body shame, eating disorder symptoms, depressive symptoms, and lower self-esteem when demographic characteristics were considered concomitantly (Harrison & Fredrickson, 2003; Tolman, Impett, Tracy, & Michael, 2006).”
Feminist Ideals for a Healthy Female Adolescent Sexuality: A Critique (2010, background): “Tolman and colleagues (Impett et al. 2006; Tolman et al. 2006 ) also conducted empirical research in this area which showed that internalizing conventional ideas about femininity, inauthenticity in relationships, and body objectification were all associated with diminished feelings of sexual self-e”