Fatness social representations and emotions in youth

Abstract

This paper analyzes how youth understand fatness. In order to do this, our study investigates the importance of the emotions in the collective construction of the fatness and the relation that the young people have with it. A free association exercise elicited by the word «fatness» was answered by 200 university students and the content was analysed using Alceste software for lexical analysis. Firstly, the results showed that the health related representation of fatness was mostly descriptive and not emotional. But fatness was also thoroughly represented as an aesthetic issue linked with social marginalization and highly correlated with negative emotions such as lonesomeness, anxiety, sadness, insecurity, embarrassment, pity or anger. In addition, the implications of the social representation of fatness and emotional responses to it, as well as their importance in the way that this health issue is faced, are considered.