An Study On How Adolescents' Negative Physical Self Affects Their Self-esteem And Academic Achievements

Due to the guidance of media and the pressure from public opinion, adolescent become increasingly concerned about their body image. It shows in many studies that body image has started to play its role since childhood, and many surveys also indicate that most of time young people are not satisfied with their body image. The phenomenon of dissatisfaction with their bodies would affect their self assessment and lower their self-esteem, thus affect their academic achievements.In the following two parts of this paper, we will use scales and the Implicit Association Test (IAT), studying about how negative physical self affects self esteem and academic achievements. The first mainly analyzed characteristics of adolescent's negative physical self and self-esteem. We will do some further discussions about the negative physical self subjects' different outcome in self-esteem and academic achievements in part two. Then by using the regression analysis, we will find out how the explicit self-esteem act as a mediator on negative physical self and academic achievements, investigate the dimensionality of negative physical self that influences self-esteem and academic achievements.The result shows:(1) Overall, adolescent are satisfied with their bodies, but the body dissatisfaction phenomenon is also common. The most dissatisfied part is general appearance, followed by shortness, facial feature, thinness and fatness. There are differences between male and female in dimensionality of satisfaction. Girls' dissatisfaction score to their bodies is higher than boys'. There were no significant differences between junior and college school students.(2) The youth have high level of explicit self-esteem and implicit self-esteem effect has universality.(3) The adolescent's negative physical self has significant negative correlation with self-esteem and academic achievement, but has nothing to do with the implicit self-esteem. Explicit self-esteem has significant positive correlation with academic achievements. Negative physical self, explicit self-esteem and academic achievements affect each other.(4) The total mean score of negative physical self is divided in high, medium and low score group. The variance analysis of their differences on self-esteem and academic achievements shows: The low score group's explicit self-esteem is higher than high and medium group's. The difference between high and medium group is statistically significant. There has no significant differences on implicit self-esteem. And the low score group's academic achievement better than others'. The difference between high and low score group's is also statistically significant.(5) The result of path analysis indicates that explicit self-esteem as a mediator between negative physical self and academic achievements. The stepwise regression analysis results show that general appearance, facial and thinness negative physical self contribute negative meaningfully to explicit self-esteem, and the facial, shortness, general appearance and thinness negative physical self can predict one's academic achievements negatively.