Fat Talk: Objectification Theory By Fredrickson And Roberts

Theories of ‘fat talk’;
The theory that has received the most empirical attention is known as the Objectification Theory by Fredrickson & Roberts (1997). This is based on the idea that women are socialised and consorted to view themselves as objects that are in turn, viewed and evaluated by others on the basis of their appearance. Manz, Petroff, Curtin & Bazzini (2009) claimed that fat talk is a “social extension of body objectification”. By engaging in fat talk, Arroyo (2014) proposes that women are not only maintaining society’s objectification theories of their bodies, but they are also re-creating and socially fabricating their own occurrence in weight deviation, social comparison and objectification. This perspective of oneself can lead
This occurs when an individual says or does something that is incompatible with their self-concept. Unpleasant psychological states are experienced which is caused by incongruity. This helps give reason for the negative influence of the corresponding procedure of fat talk on one’s self-concept. Bem (1967) proposed the Self-perception theory as an alternate version of this theory however, it hypothesises that ‘behaviour causes attitudes’ opposing the standard inclination that attitudes shape behaviour. Another theory is known as pluralistic ignorance Miller + McFarland (1987). These theories best elucidate how fat talk utilizes its negative impacts and why women part take in fat talk despite the consequences. Shannon & Mills (2015). Suggested however, that to better these theories, individual differences should be taken into account as this may subside the impact the influence of fat talk of any given
Clarke, Murnen & Smolak (2010) developed 9 vignettes which included a young woman engaging in fat talk. This is known as the Fat Talk Scale. The subjects then complete a questionnaire on similarities between the woman in the vignettes and themselves. This scale is found to have high internal consistency, test-retest reliability and discriminant validity (Clarke et al. 2010).
Another measure that exhibits high test-retest reliability, internal consistency, convergent validity and divergent validity (Engeln-Maddox et al. 2012), is the Negative Body Talk Scale by Engeln-Maddox, Salk & Miller (2012). This measures how frequently the participant forms specific statements in social situations, regarding fat talk. However it is noted that this measure has yet to be used over an extensive population of those with vast demographics.
The final measure that is frequently used in studies based around fat talk, is the Fat Talk Questionnaire by Royal, McDonald & Dionne (2013) which is a Likert scale that inquires about the respondents own behaviour, therefore it does not analyse the corresponding attributes towards fat