The Effect Of Mental Stress On The Female College Students’ Body Weight Perception

Body weight perception was closely related to the individuals’ eating disorder and weight control behaviors. It was easier to perceive inaccurately on their body weight perception for women. The majority of women had sought exceeding thin body and been dissatisfied with their body weight. Therefore, researches about female body weight perception had been a hot area in this research field. Existing researches about body weight perception were basically discussed from the sociocultural view. This study combined with questionnaire survey and experimental research to investigate factors that affect female college students’ body weight perception, and contributed to explore the female universities students’ body weight perception from psychological view, detect the effect of mental stress on the female college students’ body weight perception, so as to rich study of body weight perception. In Study 1, 700 female college students completed the female Photographic Figure Rating Scale, Sociocultural Attitudes towards Appearance Scale and Chinese 14-item Perceived Stress Scale, and then, the linear equation was built based on collected data. Results of Study 1 showed female college students’ body weight perception was mainly influenced by their actual body weight and mental stress. And also, Study 1 found the significant linear correlation between female college students’ mental stress and body weight perception. In Study 2, we selected 60 female college students as subjects and classified them into 3 groups(underweight group, normal-weight group and overweight group) by their actual body weight. And then we designed an experiment to explore the relationships between body weight, mental stress and body weight perception. Study 2 proved that the changes of female college students’ body weight perception depended on students’ body weight and mental stress.