Development of the Appearance Schemas Inventory: A new cognitive body-image assessment

The Appearance Schemas Inventory (ASI) is a 14-item scale designed to assess core beliefs or assumptions about the importance, meaning, and effects of appearance in one's life. Reliability and validity was examined for a group of 274 female college students. The ASI is acceptably internally consistent, reasonably free of social desirability, and unaffected by subjects' body masses. The ASI also converges significantly and appropriately with a variety of measures of body image and psychosocial functioning, albeit more distinctively the former than the latter. Women seeking treatment for a negative body image had higher ASI scores than their peers. Factor analysis suggested three moderately interrelated components of the ASI—termed body-image vulnerability, self-investment, and appearance stereotyping. These findings and those of other recent studies attest to the ASI's potential utility in assessing body-image cognition among both nonclinical and body-dissatisfied populations.

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