Body Dissatisfaction and Anxiety: Gender Asymmetries

Luciana Cantera (), Daniel Miles () and Maximo Rossi ()
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Luciana Cantera: Departamento de Economía, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, Universidad de la República

No 520, Documentos de Trabajo (working papers) from Department of Economics - dECON

Abstract: In this paper we discuss the association between body dissatisfaction, measured as the difference between actual and ideal body image, and anxiety, a mental health condition that affects an individual’s quality of life. We focus on two issues. First, whether there are gender asymmetries in this association. Our results suggest that women’s anxiety events are significantly more correlated with body dissatisfaction than for men. Second, we analyze two measures of anxiety: a subjective perceived episode of anxiety and a diagnosis of anxiety by a physician. Our findings suggest that the subjective measure overestimates the association between body dissatisfaction and anxiety.

Keywords: body image; dissatisfaction; gender; anxiety; Uruguay (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D91 I10 I12 I30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 19 pages
Date: 2020-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
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https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12008/25965 (application/pdf)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ude:wpaper:0520

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