The attention to body shape scale: a new measure of body focus

An abnormal degree of attention to one's body shape has been implicated in the development and maintenance of eating pathology. This article reports on three preliminary reliability and validity studies of the Attention to Body Shape Scale (ABS). Although brief, the ABS was found to be internally consistent and relatively stable over 2 weeks for both women and men. As expected, women were more body-focused on the ABS than were men. Preliminary validation studies on college women had encouraging results. Lending evidence of convergent validity, the ABS correlated with measures of eating pathology and dietary restraint. Moreover, although the ABS correlated with a measure of general-appearance orientation, regression analyses showed that the former was more closely linked than the latter to eating pathology. As evidence of discriminant validity, the ABS failed to correlate with dysphoria, body weight, or the tendency to eat in response to emotional or environmental pressures. As predicted by theory, high scores on the ABS were associated with body-image distortion. However, contrary to predictions, the ABS failed to moderate the impact of induced anxiety on body image on two of three measures. The implications of these findings and suggestions for future work are discussed.