| Age Group | Development of Body Image | Developmental Disturbances in Body Image |
|---|
| Infant and toddler | - Becomes aware of body boundaries and separateness of own external body from others through sensory stimulation.
- Explores external body parts; handles and controls the environment and body through play, bathing, and eating.
- Experiences pain, shame, fear, and pleasure. Feels doubt or power in mastery of motor skills and strives for autonomy. Learns who one is in relation to the world.
| Infant - Inadequate somatosensory stimulation → impaired ego development, increased anxiety level, poor foundation for reality testing.
- Continues to see external objects as extension of self → unrealistic, distorted perceptions of significant persons, inability to form normal attachments to others (possessive, engulfing, autistic, withdrawn).
Toddler - If body fails to meet parental expectations → shameful, self-deprecating feelings.
- Failure to master environment and control own body → helplessness, inadequacy, and doubt.
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| Preschool and school age | - Experiences praise, blame, derogation, or criticism for body, its parts, or use (pleasure, pain, doubt, or guilt).
- Explores genitals—discovers anatomical differences between sexes with joy, pride, or shame.
- Begins awareness of sexual identity.
- Differentiates self as a body and self as a mind.
| Preschool - Distortion of body image of genital area due to conflict over pleasure versus punishment.
- If body build does not conform to sex-typed expectations and sex role identification → body image confusion.
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- Beginning of self-concept; of self as man or woman.
- Learns mastery of the body (to do, to protect self, to protect others) and environment (run, skip, skate, swim); feels pleasure, competence, worth, or inadequacy.
| School age - Physical impairments (speech, poor vision, poor hearing) → feelings of inadequacy and inferiority.
- Overly self-conscious about, and excessive focus on, body changes in puberty.
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| Adolescent | - Physical self is of more concern than at any other time except old age.
- Forced body awareness due to physical changes (new senses, proportions, features); feelings of pleasure, power, confidence, or helplessness, pain, inadequacy, doubt, and guilt.
- Adult body proportions emerge.
- Anxiety over ideal self versus emerging/emerged physical self; body is compared competitively with same-sex peers.
- Use of body (adolescents’ values and attitudes) to relate with opposite sex.
- Body image crucial for self-concept formation, status achievement, and adequate social relations.
- Physical changes need to be integrated into evolving body image (strong, competent, powerful, or weak and helpless).
| - Growth and changes may produce distorted view of self → overemphasis on defects with compensations; inflated ideas of body ability, beauty, perfection; preoccupation with body appearance or body processes, women more likely than men to see body fatter than it is; egocentrism.
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| Early adulthood | - Learns to accept own body without undue preoccupation with its functions or control of these functions.
- Stability of body image.
| - Less dependable, less likable body → regression to adolescent behavior and dress due to denial of aging, defeat, depression, self-pity, egocentrism due to fear of loss of sexual identity, withdrawal to early old age.
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| Middle age | - New challenges due to differential rates of aging in various body parts.
- Body not functioning as well; unresolved fears, misconceptions, and experiences in relation to body image persist and become recognized.
| - Women more likely to judge themselves uglier than do men or younger and older women.
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| Old age | - Accelerated physical decline with influence on self-concept and lifestyle.
- Can accept self and personality as a whole; continued emphasis on physical self, with increased emphasis on inner, emotional self.
| - Ill health → fear of invalidism, hypochondriasis.
- Denial related to feelings of threatened incapacity and fear of declining functions.
- Despair over loss of beauty, strength, and youthfulness, with self-disgust about body → projection of criticism onto others.
- Regression.
- isolation (separation of affect and thought) leads to less intense response to death, disease, aging.
- Compartmentalization (focus on one thing at a time) causes narrowing of consciousness, resistance, rigidity, repetitiveness.
- Resurgence of egocentrism.
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