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norms. However, ideal body promotion is different to males and females. In last decades, ideal women are
portrayed as long haired, long eyelashed, slim, long legs and rounded buttocks. On the other hand, ideal male
appearance is described as tall, lean, muscular, broad shoulders and slim waist (Murnen, 2011). Such “ideal
norms” are described to all not only to adolescents, by TV shows, internet websites, magazines, social
network, video games, clothes store even through everyday conversation of peers and family members.
These kind of norms is very effective in stimulating people to fit on people’s acceptance without considering
its positive and negative consequences. There is a big influence of accepted ideal body image on individual’s
self-perception since all the information is saved in people’s unconscious thoughts and one day may come
out as a harmful behavior like eating disorder.
Because of people’s excessive interest in their body shape and weight, many kind of assessment
techniques were developed throughout this period of time. Instruments differ from one another based on
variables going to be tested. The first assessment is based on body shape construct that aims to test body self-
concept, visual perception, internal image of self. Another instrument is designed to assess the difference of
body perception among female and male, adolescents and adults, obese people and slender people, sighted
people and blind people. Another instrument differs from others based on its type of measurement tool: self-
report questionnaire, projective tests or interview assessments. The last designed and widely used instrument
is called The Body Shape Questionnaire (BSQ; Cooper, Taylor, Cooper, & Fairburn, 1987; Appendix 2)
which is a brief self-report measure that concerns people’s perception of body shape and its appearance. The
Body Shape Questionnaire consists of six categorized Likert scales (“never”, “rarely”, “sometimes”, “often”,
“usually” and “always”) and scored by summing the scores. Total scores may vary from minimum to
maximum, where higher point is accepted as an indicator of body dissatisfaction, lower point is explained as
inexistence of body dissatisfaction.
The concept of body image was studied from different dimension till its emergence as a concept. The
current article aims to describe body image from teenagers’ perspective, how it is formed and what kind of
changes body dissatisfaction can cause in their personal and social life. Perception of self is especially very
crucial concept during the teenage years, because it may form some kind of eating disorders like anorexia,
bulimia, obesity which is nowadays very common in all cultures and which influences on entire human life.
Our main focus will be to investigate the influence of negative personal body image on social anxiety. Social
anxiety is a feeling of fear about being negatively evaluated by other people and we believe that one of the
main causes of social anxiety is negative perception of self. We expect that body dissatisfaction is one of the
main causes of social anxiety which prevents teenagers being active, social, integrated with other people. On
the other hand, social anxiety has negative influence on self-esteem, interpersonal relationship of teenagers
which have negative influences on their overall successful development. The aim of the current study is to
investigate body image perception among Kazakhstani teenagers and to make people aware about how
perception of self is important on their physical and psychological well-being. In further researches we
believe that awareness of people about importance of body image perception will be helpful to create
different kind of trainings that will be influential on individuals’ overall self, success in personal and social
life.
References
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image
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