That is, Barbie is thought to represent the longstanding idealized female figure of beauty, and her body proportions have been identified as both unrealistic and unhealthy in the popular press and empirical papers.

These dolls, however, have been critiqued for promoting unhealthy thinness and appearance-based ideals. For generations of young girls, the Barbie doll has been a popular toy of choice. Playtime is a critical aspect of childhood development because learning occurs by modelling the behaviors and internalizing the ideals and values of other people who are engaging in social interactions. Results provide new evidence on the underlying cognitive mechanisms that occur when girls are exposed to physique-salient toys, and may have implications for young girls’ body image development and use of appearance-based social comparisons. These findings indicate that girls engage in a self-other body matching process when viewing Barbie, but that the strength of this matching is influenced by the doll’s body type. 05) body-part compatibility effects emerged for the original, curvy and petite dolls, but not for the tall Barbie. Female children and adolescents ( N = 38 M age = 10 6–14 years old SD = 2.24 years) completed a body-part compatibility task to provide an index of how they implicitly relate cognitive representations of their own body to the different doll images. This study investigated whether young girls engage in an automatic “self-other matching” process when viewing the different Barbie doll representations. Mattel produced new Barbie dolls with “tall”, “curvy”, and “petite” body types, yet how girls perceive and evaluate the three new Barbie body types remains unknown. The original Barbie doll’s unrealistic body shape can negatively affect young girls’ body image. The person making the request may, upon request from the corresponding author, be required to submit a CV or other documentation to verify academic and research credentials. The request should include a rationale for the access, a discussion of the plan of how the data will be reanalyzed, and a discussion of how the data will be stored and protected. Timothy Welsh ( Alternatively, the lead author (Amy Nesbitt and the co-authors Melissa deJonge ( and Shauna Solomon-Krakus ( are all able to share the aggregated data. Requests for access to the data should be made directly to the corresponding author (Dr. The aggregate would be sufficient to replicate and verify the study’s conclusions.

Aggregate data will be available on request to qualified researchers who have received approval. Participant level data are not available due to consideration for participant privacy as well as the fact that participants did not give consent to the sharing of their data, which is consistent with restrictions placed by the University of Toronto Health Sciences Research Ethics Board.

Barbie doll picture