Thinness expectancies and restraint in Black and White college women: a prospective study

Despite stereotypes to the contrary, women of diverse racial backgrounds, including Black women, experience disordered eating symptoms. While there has been an increase in research comparing disordered eating symptoms across ethnic groups, there remains a dearth of research on the mechanisms of action underlying the development of these symptoms in non-White populations. Thinness expectancies prospectively predict disordered eating symptoms in adolescent girls, but the majority of research on expectancies has been conducted with White samples. Restraint, or self-initiated attempts to restrict food intake, may be precipitated by cognitive factors such as thinness expectancies. In the current study, we followed a sample of Black and White women over one semester of college to assess the influence of thinness expectancies and ethnic identity on restraint. Our sample consisted of 193 college women (93 Black women). We found that White women experienced restraint at higher levels than Black women, but both Black and White women experienced an increase in restraint across the first semester in college. The endorsement of thinness expectancies added significant incremental variance to the prediction of restraint over time, when baseline restraint was included in the model. These effects were not moderated by ethnicity nor ethnic identity. This study adds to the scarce literature on phenomenology of disordered eating in Black women.