Predictors of Achievement from Early Childhood to Adulthood

 描述（由申请人提供）：该项目将大大有助于身体吸引力作为社会分层的来源，对健康有广泛的影响，类似于更经常研究的因素，如种族和性别越来越多的研究机构。健康是一 该项目方法的组成部分-作为身体吸引力的维度（例如，体重），作为身体吸引力对社会和学术成就产生影响的机制（例如，心理健康），并且因为预期反映身体吸引力历史的成年社会经济成就是终身健康和健康差距的基本组成部分。该项目还将通过扩大公共使用数据集为该费尔德提供实用服务，以便它可以用于研究吸引力在各种结果中的作用，包括健康行为和健康差异。具体来说，该项目将通过重新编码已经在NICHD早期儿童保育和青年发展研究中收集的近12个时间点的录像带，创建从婴儿期到青春期身体吸引力的最全面的纵向数据。它将描述这个队列中的美丽轨迹，并测试来自研究人员在新书中提出的综合理论模型的重要假设。基于地位特征和生命历程理论以及发展系统和污名的观点，美丽与更高成就的关联预计将通过心理健康机制，包括积极情绪，感知能力和自尊。这些心理健康资源预计将抵消一些好看的方式可能会分散从学校（即，物质资产可能会在青年人进入和度过青春期时，以及在相关的同龄人环境中，加剧他们攀登社会阶梯的愿望）。协会的社会位置（性别，种族/民族，社会经济地位），由发展时期（幼儿，小学，初中和高中），并通过生态环境（学校）的强度的差异也将进行检查。这个项目的结果，以及通过该项目创建的公共使用数据的新来源，将刺激未来的发展，社会心理和公共卫生研究的身体吸引力作为一种分层的力量。这些结果将被写入学术期刊文章并广泛传播，鉴于公众、媒体和政策对这一专题的兴趣，这一点很重要。

 DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This project will significantly contribute to the growing body of research on physical attractiveness as a source of social stratification that has wide implications for health, akin to more frequently studied factors like race and gender. Health is an integral component of the approach to this project-as a dimension of physical attractiveness (e.g., weight), as a mechanism by which physical attractiveness has effects on social and academic achievement (e.g., mental health), and because the adult socioeconomic attainment that is expected to reflect histories of physical attractiveness is a fundamental component of lifelong health and health disparities. This project also will provide a practical service to the feld by expanding a public use data set so that it can be used to study the role of attractiveness in a wide variety of outcomes, including health behaviors and health disparities. Specifically, the project will create the most comprehensive longitudinal data ever amassed of physical attractiveness from infancy through adolescence by re-coding videotapes that were already gathered at nearly a dozen time points in the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development. It will describe trajectories of beauty in this cohort and test important hypotheses derived from an integrative theoretical model put forward in a new book by the investigators. Based on status characteristics and life course theory as well as developmental systems and stigma perspectives, beauty's association with higher achievement is expected to operate through mental health mechanisms, including positive mood, perceived competence, and self esteem. These mental health resources are expected to counteract some of the ways being good looking could distract from schooling (i.e., physical assets might accentuate desires to climb the social ladder as young people move into and through adolescence and its associated peer contexts). Differences in the strength of associations by social location (gender, race/ethnicity, SES), by developmental period (early childhood, elementary, junior, and high school), and by ecological contexts (schools) will also be examined. The results of this project, and the new source of public use data created through the project, will stimulate future developmental, social psychological, and public health research on physical attractiveness as a stratifying force. These results will be written up for academic journal articles and also widely disseminated, which is important given the public, media and policy interest in the topic.