More than the Mirror

Body dissatisfaction has increased significantly in the past several decades among America's female population. Additionally, body dissatisfaction has been associated with a myriad of negative consequences, making the search for protective factors against body dissatisfaction an important undertaking. The current study draws on theoretical and empirical work to propose that instrumentality, a widely recognized and researched personality variable, is related to body dissatisfaction, and may contribute to understanding why ethnic differences in body dissatisfaction between African-American and Caucasian female adolescents exist. The study also examined how the relationship between body focus and body dissatisfaction is impacted by instrumentality. Specifically, this research proposed the following major hypotheses: (a) instrumentality is negatively correlated with body dissatisfaction, (b) ethnicity does not account for variance in body dissatisfaction when instrumentality's effects are considered, and (c) body focus is positively correlated with body dissatisfaction, and moderates the relationship between instrumentality and body dissatisfaction.