An investigation of current American society's depiction of the ideal female body was performed. Body measurements of Playboy magazine centerfolds and MissAmerica contestants for 1979-1988 indicated body weight 13-19% below expected weight for women in that age group. Miss America contestants showed a significant decrease in expected weight between 1979 and 7 988. Comparisons were made with an earlier study which had demonstrated that body measurements of both groups had decreased during the period 1959-1978 and exercise articles in six women's magazines were tabulated for 1959-1988. A significant increase in both diet articles and exercise articles occurred during this period. These findings suggest that the overvaluation of thinness continues and thinness is now sought through both dieting and exercise. & English, 1978). One way to trace trends in ideal beauty is to examine various depictions of beauty in the media, ranging from art or portraits in the pre-camera age to commercial advertisements and photographs in the present (Lakoff & Scherr, 1984). Historically, people, especially women, have tried to change their bodies to conform to the specific era's image of beauty (EhrenreichThree studies have demonstrated the current emphasis on thinness in the media. A study of English fashion models over the years 1967-1987 demonstrated that the desired body shape for models was becoming more tubular, with bust and hips decreasing while height and waist increased (Morns,

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The cognitive theories of depression emphasize the role of pessimism about the future in the etiology and maintenance of depression. The present research was designed for two reasons: to provide a clear demonstration that depressed individuals' predictions of the likelihood of future outcomes are more pessimistic than those of nondepressed individuals given identical information with which to make forecasts and identical conditions for forecasting, and to test two additional hypotheses regarding possible mechanisms underlying depressives' relative pessimism in forecasting: a social-comparison and a differential attributional-style hypothesis. We used a modification of the cue-use paradigm developed by Ajzen (1977, Experiment 1) and examined depressed and nondepressed people's predictions of the likelihood of future positive and negative outcomes for themselves and for others. The results provided strong support for pessimism on the part of depressed individuals relative to nondepressed individuals in forecasts for both self and others. In addition, whereas nondepressives exhibited a self-enhancing bias in which they overestimated their probability of success and underestimated their probability of failure relative to that of similar others, depressives did not succumb to either positive or negative social comparison biases in prediction. Finally, in line with the attributional-style hypothesis, depressed-nondepressed differences in subjects' cue-use patterns were obtained, especially in forecasts for self. The findings are discussed with respect to the mechanisms underlying predictive optimism and pessimism and the possible functions and implications of these predictive biases.

Both the increasingly thin images and the striking increase in full-body portrayals suggest an increase in the value placed by American society on a thin ideal for women, a change that is concurrent with the increase in disturbed eating patterns among American women.

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