Happiness and despair on the catwalk: Need satisfaction, well-being, and personality adjustment among fashion models

Abstract

According to self-determination theory, well-being and healthy personality development depend on the fulfillment of three basic psychological needs: autonomy, relatedness, and competence. However, various contextual features can interfere with need satisfaction and undermine well-being. We hypothesized that fashion models, who are often valued for superficial reasons (i.e., their looks) and who may not have regular opportunities to cultivate deep relationships or exercise personal control on the job, might experience lower psychological need satisfaction, less well-being, and less optimal personality adjustment. Two studies were conducted in which professional fashion models (N = 56 in Study 1; N = 35 in Study 2) were compared to approximately equally large groups of non-models. Fashion models reported slightly lower need satisfaction and well-being but greater personality maladjustment (personality disorder features). Mediation analyses in Study 1 suggested that the lower well-being among models was explained via unfulfilled basic needs. These findings further substantiate the importance of basic need satisfaction for well-being and optimal adjustment.

Keywords:

• Need satisfaction
• happiness
• personality adjustment
• fashion models

Notes

1. It should also be noted that the studies documenting the various benefits of attractiveness did not focus on models, as such. Therefore, it is not entirely clear whether any potential beauty-related advantages shown in these studies generalize to fashion models.

2. Even though models differed slightly in age (and also in terms of income, such that models reported that they earned slightly more money than non-models), these demographic differences did not appear to systematically influence our findings with regard to happiness, well-being, need satisfaction, or personality adjustment in either of the two studies reported here. That is, when we controlled for these variables, all the main findings reported below remained essentially unchanged. For the sake of simplicity, the analyses with these covariates are not reported in detail; further information is available upon request from the first author.