10.1177/0146167205284005PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY BULLETINHalliwell, Dittmar / APPEARANCE-RELATED SE F-DISCREPANCIES Associations Between Appearance-Related Self-Discrepancies and Young Women’s and Men’s Affect, Body Satisfaction, and Emotional Ea

This study examines the associations between appearance-related, actual-ideal self-discrepancies—from both own and romantic partner’s standpoints—and negative affect, body sat-isfaction, and eating behavior. It extends previous research through studying both genders and the romantic partner stand-point, but its main novel contribution is a systematic com-parison between idiographic, participant-generated, and nomothetic, fixed-item measures of appearance-related self-discrepancies. The findings show that these measures cannot be, and should not be, treated as equivalent. The idiographic measures were superior in predicting outcome variables when considering the own standpoint. Nomothetic measures did dem-onstrate some gender-specific associations, but only from the romantic partner standpoint, and only for women. These find-ings can be explained with respect to the assessment of accessible, versus available, self-discrepancies. Implications for self-discrepancy and body image theory and research are discussed