What do tautological phrases such asBoys will be boys, A promise is a promise, or War is war mean and how are they understood? These phrases literally appear to be uninformative, yet speakers frequently use such expressions in conversation and listeners have little difficulty comprehending them. Understanding nominal tautologies requires that listeners/readers infer the speaker's attitude toward the noun phrase (e.g.,boys) mentioned in the sentence. The purpose of the present studies was to investigate the role of context, syntactic form, and lexical content in the interpretation of nominal tuatologies. Two studies are reported in which subjects rated the acceptability of different tautological constructions either alone (Experiment 1) or with supporting contextual information (Experiment 2). The results of these studies provide evidence that colloquial tautologies can be interpreted differently in different contexts, but that there are important regularities in the syntactic form and lexical content of these phrases which influence how they are understood. Our findings highlight the importance of speakers/listeners' stereotypical understanding of people, activities, and concrete objects in the use and understanding of different tautological expressions. The implications of this research for psycholinguistic theories of conversational inference and indirect language use are discussed.
Findings on peer and parental teasing have been particularly inconsistent. While in some studies [26] girls were more frequently faced with peer teasing, others did not find any gender difference [18, 27] or even found more teasing experiences among boys [7, 16]. The same applies with parental teasing. Some studies did not find a gender difference [6, 16] and others have revealed that girls perceive more parental teasing [24, 27]. These inconsistencies might result from the measurement of teasing as isolated indices or as combinations of peer and parental teasing. Hence, validity and reliability might have been restricted.
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Developmental theories on the transformation of relationships with peers and parents [28] suggest that social pressure might change throughout adolescence. Further, the gender intensification hypothesis of Hill and Lynch [29] suggests that pressure from peers and parents to conform to gender roles, behavior and appearance standards intensifies during adolescence. However, only a few studies have investigated developmental effects in the field of social pressure and reported a growing influence of friends and an increase in appearance pressure by other peers (e.g., schoolmates) during middle adolescence [1, 7]. In addition, Dohnt and Tiggemann [30] provided interesting findings on the impact of school and class norms among elementary school girls in the first four years of formal schooling. While girls in the first year at school thought that their peers would desire a larger figure, girls from grade two to four already assumed that their peers desired a thinner figure. These results suggest that orientation towards a certain body ideal as well as appearance-related school and class norms develop very early. Interestingly, Chen and Jackson [31] reported an age-gender interaction among a sample of Chinese adolescents, suggesting that appearance conversations between friends might increase with age only among girls but not among boys. However, they could not establish a comparable effect regarding general appearance-related pressure. In contrast to a probable increase in appearance-related interactions, teasing and exclusion proved to be rather stable during adolescence [7]. Jones [1] even found a decrease in reported teasing among adolescents from grades 10 to 11, which indicates that teasing becomes less important with the transition to adulthood.
Many studies have examined stigmatization of overweight and obese persons. As appearance stigmatization is a distinct and serious form of social pressure, including peer teasing and exclusion alike, it can be concluded that overweight persons per se experience more of these kinds of pressure [9]. Beyond that, a few studies have also suggested a higher amount of teasing experiences among underweight adolescents [26]. The results of Jones and Crawford [7] even suggest an interaction of weight and gender: While particularly overweight girls experienced teasing and fear of exclusion, underweight boys displayed the highest scores. These results were interpreted with regard to the different beauty ideals for men and women: Girls who do not fit the slim norm and boys who do not fit the bulky, muscular male ideal are more exposed to stigmatization. However, the findings have left the question unanswered whether deviating from normal weight per se increases the risk of being subjected to more direct peer pressure or whether weight-related variations are different for girls and boys.
Studies reporting relationships between weight status and parental pressure are even sparser. A few studies reported higher scores in parental teasing among overweight boys and girls [24, 26, 35]. Regarding parental encouragement to lose weight, Wertheim et al. [25] found a moderate positive association with weight status for early adolescent boys and girls alike. Unfortunately, the study did not consider muscle gaining. Finally, Rodgers et al. [24] could not find an association between weight status and the perception of appearance-related parental norms and modeling behavior.
In summary, more knowledge on variation according to individual characteristics is needed to explain the development of negative body image and to design targeted prevention approaches. While previous studies have provided important findings on the impact of single types of social pressure and general behavioral mechanisms, findings on gender, age and weight variations in different aspects of social pressure have either been incomplete or controversial, because only a few studies have explicitly focused on these individual differences. Moreover, due to restricted sample size most of the studies could not consider possible interactions between the three factors. Finally, research has often concentrated on girls, or when it included boys, the applied measures often contained a bias towards the thin ideal that is not suitable for boys.
The current study attempts to contribute to an enhancement of current theories on appearance-related social pressure by investigating the occurrence of different types of pressure in a large sample of German adolescent boys and girls. Moreover it provides a comprehensive exploration of differential effects of gender, weight, and grade as well as interactions among these factors. Based on previous findings, we expected the following:
The research of the recent years has posed the question whether the emphasis placed on female beauty sets girls at greater risk for appearance-related social pressure or whether these effects have derived from biased instruments that were unsuitable for boys. Even if several studies have pointed to the growing relevance of appearance among boys and some gender differences diminished when studies use muscle- and weight-related instruments, most of the findings suggest that the focus on appearance is still stronger for females. Consequently, we hypothesized that girls would show higher levels of peer pressure through modeling by friends, school and class norms, peer teasing and exclusion as well as higher levels of parental pressure through parental teasing, encouragement to control weight and shape, parental norms and modeling and injustice and ignorance.
Finally, research has raised the hypothesis that either a) higher weight status per se sets individuals at greater risk for stigmatization or b) girls with higher weight are stigmatized if they do not fit the female slim ideal, whereas boys experience teasing and exclusion if they are too thin and do not fit the male muscular ideal. As the majority of studies have found evidence for the first hypothesis, we predicted that overweight girls and boys would report higher levels of all kinds of peer pressure (i.e. teasing, exclusion, influences by friends, pressure from school and class norms).
Because to our knowledge no instrument exists that measures social pressure from peers and parents simultaneously while distinguishing various types of pressure, we developed the Appearance-Related Social Pressure Questionnaire (FASD, Fragebogen zum aussehensbezogenen sozialen Druck [17]). To gather an accurate measure of social pressure we included on the one hand those social impacts established in the literature and on the other hand conducted qualitative interviews with adolescent girls and boys exploring important sources of social pressure in their daily lives. The literature predominantly provides evidence for comparable risk factors for body concerns in both boys and girls [e.g. [41, 42]. The findings from our interviews during the item generation also pointed to comparable forms of social pressure. However, we had to ensure that the phrases were suitable for both girls and boys as well as for adolescents with different weight statuses. Thus, we used general terms like appearance or body shape and tried to avoid specific ones like thinness to avoid a bias. The 32 items are rated on a 5-point Likert scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). A series of structural equation models was used to investigate the factor structure of the FASD. The best fitting model revealed two parts (peer and parental pressure), each consisting of four scales that comprise four items, respectively, and ask about different types of appearance-related social pressure.
In sum, gender differences in peer pressure were noteworthy and indicated that girls perceived more pressure from peers compared to boys, while the largest difference was revealed for modeling by friends. 2ff7e9595c
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