How cultural orientation and self-compassion shape objectified body consciousness for women from America, Belgium, Russia, and Thailand

ABSTRACT

According to objectification theory, being treated as an object leads women to engage in self-objectification, which in turn increases body surveillance and body shame, impairing women’s mental health. While most studies focusing on self-objectification rely heavily on Western populations that emphasize individualism, the current work investigates the phenomenon of body surveillance and body shame in a cross-cultural framework, involving a comparison between American, Belgian, Russian, and Thai women (N = 605). This study aims to highlight two predictors – cultural orientation and self-compassion. Results indicate that greater endorsement of vertical individualism is related to body surveillance for American, Belgian, and Russian women; however, this relation occurred in the opposite direction for Thai women. Moreover, Americans’ higher levels of body surveillance and body shame coexist with less self-compassion, whereas the reverse was true for Thais. We also tested a complementary moderation model and found that the relation between body surveillance and body shame was moderated by self-compassion, further pointing to the important role of self-compassion in the model posited by objectification theory. As a result, discussion centers on a call for future research to more closely examine how self-objectification and its correlates unfold among women of various cultural backgrounds.

KEYWORDS:

• Body surveillance
• body shame
• self-objectification
• self-compassion
• cultural orientation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Online supplementary material can be found here: https://osf.io/f29sw/

2. HI: α_All =.71; α_American =.72; α_Belgian =.79; α_Russian =.62; α_Thai =.63. VI: α_All =.72; α_American =.68; α_Belgian =.78; α_Russian =.73; α_Thai =.63. HC: α_All =.64; α_American =.69; α_Belgian =.67; α_Russian =.65; α_Thai =.71. VC: α_All =.66; α_American =.75; α_Belgian =.80; α_Russian =.64; α_Thai =.61. Body surveillance: (α_All =.84; α_American =.88; α_Belgian =.80; α_Russian =.82; α_Thai =.79. Body shame: α_All =.84; α_American =.90; α_Belgian =.88; α_Russian =.78; α_Thai =.72. Self-compassion: α_All =.83; α_American =.85; α_Belgian =.82; α_Russian =.69; α_Thai =.79.

3. Unless otherwise indicated, analyses were conducted using the average scores of each measure.