Abstract

This study was to explore the relations between life stress and body perception (private/public body perception, and body competence), and the mediating effects of problem-focused and/or emotion-focused coping on body perception. The measures utilized in this study were the stress (Choi, 1986) and coping (Kim, 1987) scales for Korean college students, and The Body Consciousness Questionnaire (Miller et al., 1981). Based on their scores on both the stress and coping scales, 193 male and female students were divided into 4 groups: high on stress and problem-focused coping (N=29), high on stress and emotion-focused coping (N=21), low on stress and problem-focused coping (N=25) , and low on stress and emotion-focused coping (N=25). The data were analyzed by the SPSS/PC+ Package. The employed statistical methods were simple correlation analysis, 2 × 2 ANOVA, and stepwise regression analysis. Results were as follows: First, there was a positive relationship between stress and private/public body perceptions, and a negative relationship between stress and body competence. The fact that stress and private/public body perception correlated positively indicates that subjects with a high stress score attend to both their, internal bodily sensations and external body, appearances. Second, both problem and emotion-focused coping were correlated positively - not negatively - with public body perception, and there was no significant negative correlation between coping and private body perception. This result suggests that a self-regulatory function of coping to reduce one's hyper-arousal was not confirmed. Third, a general interactive effect of stress and coping on body perception was not confirmed; however through stepwise regression analysis, the interaction of specific stress and coping improved with just a little more variance to explain the scores of public body perception and body competence. Fourth, it was clear that the effect of stress on private body perception, and the effect of coping on body competence respectively, were significant. Consequently, the mediating effect of coping on the relations between stress and body perception was not confirmed, but only a local interaction of two variables was observed in this study. Collectively, these results indicate that the subjects of this study were not so highly stressed as to need the mediating function of coping.