Body Image 32 (2020) 70–84 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Body Image journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/bodyimage The Happy American Body 2.0: Predictors of affective body satisfaction in two U.S. national internet panel surveys David A. Frederick a,* , Justin R. Garcia b , Amanda N. Gesselman c , Kristen P. Mark d , Elaine Hatfield e , George Bohrnstedt f a Crean College of Health and Behavioral Sciences, Chapman University, United States b The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction and, Department of Gender Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington, United States c The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, Indiana University, Bloomington, United States d Department of Kinesiology and Health Promotion, University of Kentucky, United States e Department of Psychology, University of Hawaii at Manoa, United States f American Institutes for Research, United States a r t i c l e i n f o Article history: Received 22 May 2019 Received in revised form 17 November 2019 Accepted 17 November 2019 Keywords: Body image Body dissatisfaction Prevalence Gender Sexual orientation Ethnicity a b s t r a c t The first national study of body image was reported four decades ago in the article The Happy American Body (Berscheid et al., 1973). To provide a modern follow-up to this study, we used two Internet panel surveys of U.S. adults to examine feelings about appearance (Survey 1: Married N = 1095; Single N = 5481) and weight, appearance, body, and muscle size/tone (Survey 2: N = 1601). Mean ages across samples for men and women ranged from 42-53. On the positive side, many men and women were somewhat-to-very satisfied with their appearance (67 %; 57 %), overall body (61 %; 46 %), weight (54 %; 42 %), and muscle tone/size (56 %; 41 %). Mean gender differences were small (Cohen’s ds = 0.18–0.32), as were sexual orientation differences within each gender (ds = |0.00-0.25|). Looking at negative body image, fewer men than women were somewhat-to- very unhappy with their appearance among married (19 %; 29 %) and single participants (29 %; 35 %), and fewer men were somewhat-to-extremely dissatisfied with their appearance (18 %; 24 %), body (27 %; 39 %), weight (36 %; 49 %), muscle tone/size (27 %; 41 %). Nearly one-fifth of men (18 %) and one-fourth of women (27 %) were very-to-extremely dissatisfied with at least one of these traits, highlighting the importance of body image interventions. © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction The first major national study of body image was conducted in 1972, when Berscheid, Hatfield [Walster], & Bohrnstedt (1973) created the 109-item Body Image Satisfaction Scale and published it in the mag- azine Psychology Today. Readers completed the survey and the results were summarized a survey report entitled “The Happy American Body” in Psychology Today (Berscheid et al., 1973) and later in more detail in an academic journal article (Frederick, Bohrnstedt, Hatfield, & Berscheid, 2014). Most people were satisfied with their overall body appearance and about half of men (55 %) and women (45 %) reported being quite- to-extremely satisfied. A minority of men and women reported being somewhat-to-extremely dissatisfied with their overall body appear- ance (15 % vs. 23 %), weight (35 % vs. 48 %), and general muscle tone/development (25 % vs. 30 %). This study was followed by two additional surveys conducted decades apart that were also reported in Psychology Today. The results showed increasing levels of body dissat- isfaction, but different methods were used each time, precluding direct comparisons of change in body image over time (Cash, Winstead, & Janda, 1986; Garner & Kearney-Cooke, 1996). * Corresponding author at: One University Drive, Orange, CA 92866, United States. E-mail address: enderflies1@aol.com (D.A. Frederick). Large-scale national studies of body image among adults have been rare in the body image literature (for reviews, see Fiske, Fallon, Blissmer, & Redding, 2014; Frederick, Jafary, Daniels, & Gruys, 2012). Due to differ- ences in sampling techniques and operational definitions of body image, however, the estimated prevalence of body dissatisfaction ranges dra- matically from 8 % to 61 % for men and 11%–72% for women (Fiske et al., 2014). Particularly lacking is an understanding of the affective aspects of body image on the national level – people’s feelings of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with aspects of their bodies and appearance (Cash & Pruzinsky, 2004). Fiske et al. (2014) identified only seven relevant arti- cles at the time of their review, only four of which had been published in peer-reviewed journals. Much of what is known about the U.S. national prevalence of affec- tive body dissatisfaction across the past twenty years is drawn from three sources. The first source is a series of five surveys including over 200,000 visitors to popular news websites such as NBCNews.com who completed a series of one-item measures of body image (Frederick, Forbes, & Berezovskaya, 2008; Frederick & Essayli, 2016; Frederick, Lever, & Peplau, 2007; Frederick, Sandhu, Morse, & Swami, 2016; Frederick, Peplau, & Lever, 2006; Lever, Frederick, & Peplau, 2006; Lever, Frederick, Laird, & Sadeghi-Azar, 2007; Peplau et al., 2009). The second source includes several large-scale studies of Mechanical Turk users that have relied on validated measures of body image. These include the National Body Project I which analyzed 11,620 Mechanical https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bodyim.2019.11.003 1740-1445/© 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.