| Physique anxious individuals feel that their body is so unattractive to others that it becomes an anxiety-producing stigma for them in self-presentational situations. An experiment tested the hypothesis that physique anxious individuals will compensate for their visible stigma by enhancing descriptions of their characterological attributes.;Two months after completing the Social Physique Anxiety (SPA) scale, individuals who scored low and who scored high were recruited for what appeared to them to be an unrelated study about forming impressions over the computer. Participants were told that their opposite-sex partner, who was ostensibly in a separate room, would be asking them questions via the computer in order to form an impression of them. In reality, the partner was being simulated by a computer program.;Half of the participants were led to believe that their partner could see them from the neck down via equipment and software that captures their photo and transmits their image to their partner's computer. The other half were led to believe that the technology failed to properly transmit their image to their partner. This physique visibility manipulation was followed by a chance for participants to describe their personality characteristics to their partner by describing themselves on a series of subjective attributes. Participants were informed that the sending of the personality information would be the final part of the interaction.;Using higher trait self-ratings as an indicator of compensatory self-presentation attempts, results showed that compensation occurred when participants believed their partners could see their body. Results also showed that women were higher in SPA than men and that sex, rather than SPA, interacted with physique visibility on the self-ratings. Compensation occurred more for women when their physiques were visible than when their physiques were not visible. Compensation did not occur for men.;Those with high SPA were most likely to have felt uncomfortable sometime during the experiment, and most attributed their anxiety to the photo-image transmittal part of the study. High SPA also affected impressions of the partner, beliefs regarding their partner's impressions, and emotions concerning meeting their partner. |
