Facial Attractiveness and Self-Esteem in Adolescence

Abstract

Facial attractiveness has been associated with many (social) advantages in life, like greater popularity, acceptance, and social competence. Because social evaluations and acceptance are important factors contributing to self-esteem (SE), we hypothesized that high levels of attractiveness would be related to increased levels of SE. To test this assumption, 230 adolescents from two age groups (13 and 15 years) were surveyed annually for 5 years. A latent growth curve model was used to model the influence of facial attractiveness on the development of SE over time. Results showed that younger adolescents with higher levels of attractiveness had lower levels of SE at baseline. Attractiveness was not found to be a significant predictor in explaining the development of SE over time. These findings indicate that attractive children are more likely to have lower levels of SE when they enter early adolescence compared to their less attractive counterparts.

This study was supported by a grant from the Behavioural Science Institute of the Radboud University Nijmegan. We thank J. Treffers for his help with programming.

Notes

*p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.

Note. The univariate correlations based on the reports of the younger adolescents are presented above the diagonal; below are those based on the reports of the older adolescents. BMI = body mass index.

*p < .05. **p < .01.

¹Including gender as an interaction factor with self-esteem did not result in significant interaction results.

Note. BMI = body mass index.

*p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.

²The full model was also tested in the full sample including older and younger adolescents together to increase statistical power. These analyses resulted in a good fit to the data, χ ²(25, n = 230) = 34.49 (CFI = .99, RMSEA = .04) but showed no significant associations between attractiveness and self-esteem.