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Body Acceptance

  • Living reference work entry
  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences

Synonyms

Body appreciation; Positive body image

Definition

Accepting one’s body regardless of not being completely satisfied with all aspects of it.

Introduction

How we see, think, feel, and act toward our bodies is conceptualized as our body image (Cash and Pruzinsky 2004). These perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are often emotionally valenced, meaning they are positive or negative in nature (Cash and Smolak 2011). In the simplest sense, an individual is said to have a negative body image if the sum total of these emotional valences is negative. Likewise, if these valences are cumulatively positive, an individual is said to have a positive body image. Dig a little deeper, however, and the constructs of positive and negative body image become considerably more complex.

Body Acceptance

Body acceptance is a construct that is closely related to positive body image. Although similar, body acceptance and positive body image are not the same thing nor, is positive body image...

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References

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Correspondence to Scott Griffiths .

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Griffiths, S. (2017). Body Acceptance. In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_486-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_486-1

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