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Appearance-related processing
Valence of appearance
The CARVAL (Moss, Hobbs & Rosser, in preparation) is a six item valence questionnaire that
measures how positively or negatively a participant evaluates their own appearance.
Responses range from 1 (strongly disagree) to 6 (strongly agree) with higher total scores
indicating a more positive self evaluation of their own appearance. Potential scale scores range
from 6-36. The scale has recently demonstrated good internal consistency (alpha=0.89) and
very good test retest reliability with a student population at three months (r= .95)
Salience of appearance
The CARSAL (Moss, Hobbs & Rosser, in preparation) measures the extent to which
appearance is part of a person’s working self concept or how important it is to a person
(salience). Response ranged from 1 (strongly disagree) to 6 (strongly agree) with higher total
scores indicating appearance forming a greater part of their self concept. Potential scale scores
range from 6-36. The scale has recently demonstrated good internal consistency (alpha=0.86)
and good test retest reliability with a student population at three months (r= .89).
Disguisability
By rating on a seven point Likert scale ranging from 1 (extremely easy) to 7 (impossible)
participants were asked how difficult they felt it was to hide or disguise the aspects of their
appearance about which they were most concerned.
Physical appearance discrepancy
The PADQ (Altabe, 1996; Altabe & Thompson 1996) distinguishes the discrepancy between
how a person perceives they look and how they or their significant others would ideally like them
to look (‘ideal’ discrepancy) or how they ought to or should look in relation to duty, responsibility,
or obligation (‘should’ discrepancy). A high ‘ideal’ discrepancy is associated with feelings of
disappointment, dissatisfaction, shame and embarrassment due to unfulfilled desires and a
belief they have lost esteem in the opinion of others. A high ‘should’ discrepancy is associated
with fear, feeling threatened, resentment and guilt due to the belief that they have transgressed
the moral standard of either themselves or significant others. The two subscales of ‘ideal’ and
‘should’ discrepancy consist of 4 items each, with responses ranging from not at all different to
extremely different yielding a total score for each subscale ranging from 4-28, with higher score
indicating greater discrepancy.
Social comparison
The social comparison scale is a brief version of the Gibbons and Buunk (1999) Iowa-
Netherlands Social Comparison measure (INCOMM). The scale measures frequency of social
comparisons. Participants were asked to complete the scale in reference to their appearance
and responses range from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree) with higher total scores
indicating a higher frequency of engagement in social comparison. Potential scale scores range
from 11-55. The scale has good internal consistency (alpha=0.83) and concurrent validity
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