Body Dissatisfaction and Somatic Complaints: The Mediating Role of Self-Criticism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study aimed to investigate whether self-criticism mediates the relationship between body dissatisfaction and somatic complaints in adolescents. A descriptive correlational research design was employed with a sample of 413 high school students from Georgia, selected based on the Morgan and Krejcie sample size determination table. Participants completed three standardized self-report instruments: the Body Shape Questionnaire-16 (BSQ-16) for body dissatisfaction, the Levels of Self-Criticism Scale (LOSC) for self-criticism, and the Children’s Somatization Inventory (CSI-24) for somatic complaints. Data were analyzed using SPSS-27 for descriptive statistics and Pearson correlation coefficients, and AMOS-21 for Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) to assess model fit and test the hypothesized mediation model. Descriptive results showed moderate to high levels of body dissatisfaction (M = 56.74, SD = 11.29), self-criticism (M = 89.63, SD = 13.57), and somatic complaints (M = 38.12, SD = 8.41). Pearson correlations indicated significant positive associations between body dissatisfaction and self-criticism (r = .48, p < .001), body dissatisfaction and somatic complaints (r = .44, p < .001), and self-criticism and somatic complaints (r = .52, p < .001). The SEM model demonstrated good fit indices (χ²/df = 1.75, CFI = 0.96, RMSEA = 0.042). Path analysis revealed a significant direct effect of body dissatisfaction on somatic complaints (β = .25, p < .001), a significant indirect effect via self-criticism (β = .20, p < .001), and a total effect of β = .45 (p < .001), supporting partial mediation. The findings highlight self-criticism as a significant cognitive mechanism through which body dissatisfaction contributes to somatic complaints in adolescents. Interventions aimed at reducing self-critical thought patterns may help mitigate the negative physical and psychological effects of body dissatisfaction in youth.
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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 | 0.009 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| 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".