Responding to and Recovering from a Body-related Threat: An Application of Social Self-Preservation Theory
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Social self-preservation theory (SSPT) suggests that when faced with social-evaluative threat, a set of psychological and physiological responses are elicited concurrently (Dickerson, Gruenewald, & Kemeny, 2004; Kemeny, Gruenewald, & Dickerson, 2004). A series of studies examined the applicability of SSPT to the examination of social-evaluative body-related threats. In the first study, interviews were conducted to identify and describe uncomfortable body-related situations, and typical responses to such situations. Findings provided preliminary evidence of the applicability of SSPT to everyday body-related threats of young adult women – the threats, context of those threats, and responses to such threats were consistent with SSPT. The second study examined psychobiological responses to, and recovery from, a social-evaluative body-related threat. Findings from this study showed that the social-evaluative body-related threat elicited a psychobiological response consistent with SSPT; women in the threat group reported higher social physique anxiety and had higher cortisol following the threat. The third study sought to extend the applicability of SSPT to examine the psychobiological responses to, and recovery from, an anticipated social-evaluative body-related threat. In addition, the potential moderating effect of appearance investment on responses to a threat was examined. Findings from this study showed that women in the threat group reported higher shame and social physique anxiety after anticipating a social-evaluative body-related threat than following a quiet rest period for women in the control group. Results also indicated that both groups showed an index of decrease for cortisol, with the control group showing a significantly greater overall decrease than the threat group. Appearance investment did not moderate cortisol responses to a threat. Findings from the third study provide partial support for SSPT’s applicability to the anticipation of a social-evaluative body-related threat. Together findings from all three studies provide converging evidence for the use of SSPT in understanding the psychobiology of body image.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".