Research Of Body Image And Self-Esteem In Cosmetic Surgery Patients

Considering the rapid development of cosmetic surgery field and the subsequent various anecdotes, the researcher has a strong interest in communicating with those cosmetic surgery patients. The study is conducted from three steps:At first, make a pre-interview. Based on relevant studies in foreign and domestic field, especially the model of body-image and cosmetic surgery proposed by Sarwer(1998), the researcher has made an outline to make an interview with ten persons who have gone surgeries. It can be seen from the results that body-image and self-esteem are the key points that they pay attention to mostly, and they have some common experiences amounting to five, such as body-image development, family environment and so on.The second step is questionnaire survey.The tools are Self-Rated of Body-Image Questionnaire,BES,SES and several items made by the dimensions exacting from the pre-interview.100 cosmetic surgery patients from TianDa hospital in ShangHai have taken part in the survey. The results are:1)Cosmetic surgery patients have lower satisfaction about their body and the differences between the two groups are significant; 2)Compared to persons without cosmetic surgeries, cosmetic surgery patients have more troubles resulting from body-image, there are significant differences in nearly all dimensions of body-image psychology, except the other regards dimension; 3)Cosmetic surgery patients have much lower self-esteem compared with their counterpart without surgeries; 4)The body-image psychology and self-esteem are significantly passively related, and the coefficient is higher than the one belonging to persons without surgeries;5)There are little relevance between body-image psychology and body-esteem scale, but the same two aspects are significantly passively related in persons without surgeries; 6)There are more BDD in cosmetic surgery patients,about 9%,while the counterpart only have 2.7%;7)Cosmetic surgery patients are more influenced by the surroundings, and have some common traits in character, such as insecurity,high defenses,depressive,closed mood and so on; 8)There are some factors influencing the body-image development of cosmetic surgerie patients, such as the cosmetic environment,media impacts,the relationships between parents,parental rearing style,negative regard in appearance from others,peer comparison and so on.The last step is a series of new interview, aiming to five cosmetic surgery patients and they are chosen from the 100 persons. Using the self-made outline, the researcher has an idea of the routes of their body-image development and the relation with self-esteem.It has very practical meaning to conduct the study of body-image and self-esteem in cosmetic surgery patients. The results can be used to call for attention to body-image and self-esteem of cosmetic surgery patients in the plastic surgeons, and therefore reduce the medical tangles resulting from the ones who need psychological counseling in fact. In the meanwhile, the research aims to propose some advice to parents,teachers and media in beauty education to promote the realization of the homonious and healthy beauty.