A growing body of literature suggests that youth with severe obesity are engaging in substance use. The purpose of the present study was to examine profiles of substance use among adolescents with severe obesity and examine how these profiles are associated with depressive symptomology using data from the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System.…

Stigmatization of overweight and obese individuals is common in interpersonal relationships. This study investigated longitudinal weight change patterns among Taiwanese adolescents and the relationship of weight change patterns with delayed romantic experience from late adolescence to young adulthood by using a representative panel survey.…

Eight percent of adolescent girls were found to be engaged in problematic social media use. Problematic social media use is associated with serious physical and mental consequences. This study aimed to explore the effects of thin-ideal internalization on problematic social media use and the role of selfie-related behaviors and friendship quality.…

Past research has documented that structural factors produce a skewed dating market in African American communities that advantages men over women. Using data collected from a sample of 495 African American young adults (55.8% women, M[subscript age] = 22), we tested the idea that African American men can be more selective when choosing dating…

The NLSY97 data were used to explore the patterns of developmental trajectories of body weight in adolescence and how they affected the likelihood of college completion in young adulthood among 2,275 youths aged 13 and 14 in Wave 1. A strong weight trajectory gradient was found for rates of college completion. The study further explored the role…

The present study used nationally representative data from the U.S. Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) merged with census-track data from the American Community Survey (ACS) to model race-ethnic disparities in overweight, obesity, and obesity-related disease among children and adolescents as a function of neighborhood race-ethnic segregation,…

Adolescents with unusually sized or shaped bodies may experience ridicule, rejection, or exclusion based on their negatively valued bodily characteristics. Such experiences can have negative consequences for a person's image and evaluation of self. This study focuses on the relationship between bodily deviations and body image and is based on a…

Social psychologists have amassed a large body of work demonstrating that overweight African American adolescent girls have generally positive self-images, particularly when compared with overweight females from other racial and ethnic groups. Some scholars have proposed that elements of African American social experience may contribute to the…

Using data from the 1994-1998 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth merged Mother and Young Adult file, this article examines the relationship between depressive symptoms and body mass index (BMI) in adolescence. The authors also examine whether this relationship varies by race and gender. Their findings indicate that over a 4-year…

The relationship between body weight and depression among adolescent females has been the subject of considerable attention from researchers. The risk of experiencing this distress, however, is not equally distributed across members of all racial groups. African American girls are generally more satisfied with their bodies and thus may be less…

Using data from the 2001 Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance Survey, this study examined select sociodemographic and psychosocial correlates of weight perceptions and weight control behaviors among Black, Hispanic and White females (n = 6,089). Results showed little difference across ethnic groups for perceptions of body weight with slightly over…