Perceived Femininity and Weight as a Function of Meal Size

In four studies, I explored the role of dietary restraint in judgments of body size based on meal size. In Study 1, restrained and unrestrained eaters watched a video of a woman eating either a small meal or a large meal. Participants were then asked to select which of two photographs of women (a heavier one or a thinner one) was the person whom they had just seen in the video. Restrained eaters in the small-meal condition were much more likely to choose the thinner target; unrestrained eaters we unaffected by the meal-size manipulation in their selection of the target photograph. These findings are consistent with previous work (Vartanian, 2000) demonstrating that restrained eaters (but not unrestrained eaters) judge women who eat smaller meals as being thinner and weighing less than women who eat larger meals. The next three studies were designed to explore certain specific differences between restrained and unrestrained eaters that could help to explain the observed differences in body-size judgments. Studies 2 and 3 focused on restraint differences in inhibitory-control functioning. In both studies, participants completed a garden-path-sentence task, which assessed implicit recall of task-relevant and task-irrelevant information. If inhibitory control is functioning optimally, individuals should recall only task-relevant information. In Study 2, unrestrained eaters recalled only task-relevant information, whereas restrained eaters tended to recall both task-relevant and task-irrelevant information, suggesting that they are less capable of suppressing or deleting irrelevant information. In Study 3, the instructions were modified slightly to guard against potential group differences in attention due to restrained eaters' perfectionistic tendencies. The pattern of results was directly opposite to that found in Study 2. Study 4 focused on group differences in personal beliefs about the connection between food intake and body weight/size. Restrained eaters were more likely to believe that the amount of food that one eats is predictive of one's body weight, whereas unrestrained eaters were more likely to believe that one's weight is fixed and genetically determined. The discussion focuses on the importance of these personal beliefs in social judgments, as well as in other areas such as one's own personal behavior., The aim of the present study was to determine whether mode of target presentation (video versus verbal) moderates the influence of meal size on perceptions of women's weight and body size. A second purpose was to determine whether differences in perceived weight mediated perceptions of femininity and masculinity. Participants were presented with either a video or written description of a woman eating either a small or large meal, and rated the targets on measures of femininity, masculinity, and weight. Whether presented verbally or visually, women who ate smaller meals were seen as more feminine and less masculine than were women who ate larger meals. In addition, restrained eaters (dieters) but not unrestrained eaters (non-dieters) perceived women who ate smaller meals as being thinner and weighing less than women who ate larger meals. Findings are discussed in terms of the different cognitive schemas held by dieters and non-dieters.