For teenage girls, researchers have found that the ways they perceive and feel about their own physical appearance are important components in their emotional well-being.

But for Black adolescent girls, satisfaction with their hair may be of particular significance, according to new research from UConn recently published in the journal Body Image.

In a cross-sectional study, researcher Adenique Lisse ’28 Ph.D. examined how 193 Black, white, and Latina girls entering grades 9 through 11 felt about their overall appearance and their satisfaction with five specific areas of their appearance – including their hair – as well as their experience with discrimination and their tendency to experience depressive symptoms.

The study found that hair was the only area of physical appearance satisfaction in which differences emerged along racial lines, according to Lisse, a graduate student focusing on clinical psychology in UConn’s Department of Psychological Sciences.

“Black adolescent girls, significantly beyond their white peers and their Latina peers, were more likely to experience hair-related discrimination and hair-related dissatisfied,” says Lisse. “That hair dissatisfaction was more likely to lead to increased feelings of depression compared to their peers.”

A member of the Milan Intergenerational Risk Lab at UConn, Lisse had done some prior work on weight concerns and body image as an undergraduate, and she was interested in seeing how appearance evaluation might have particular impact for Black adolescents.

But she didn’t find a lot of prior research.

“In looking at some sociocultural factors that were in play, I found that body image concerns were not something that were very salient within the Black adolescent population,” Lisse says. “A lot of that research focuses on the thin ideal, which is something that is more heavily researched within white samples and among white adolescents.”

The research was also inspired by her own experiences as well.

“I wanted to see what is salient amongst Black adolescents and what part of appearance evaluation we might see some important results in,” explains Lisse. “That made me think about my own experience growing up and how much conversation there is within the Black community about hair. Recently, we’ve been seeing a movement for more hair acceptance, and talking about that a lot more within different spaces.”

During her own adolescence, a rise in natural hair content on YouTube caught her attention and helped to influence how she and her friends felt about their hair texture – an entire online movement working to change the messaging around the idea that a loose hair texture was somehow more desirable.

“A lot of Black adolescent girls may not have hair like that – they might have hair that is more coily in texture, and that leaves room for discrimination and microaggressions,” Lisse says. “And so, that was a movement that, I think, was very helpful. That representation is very important for people to see. And I think that helped so many girls, adolescent girls, love their hair – to be able to see that there’s so much that they can do with it as well.”

For her study, Lisse says that its cross-sectional nature, and limited sample – all participants were from one Connecticut city – limit how the findings might be generalized across broader populations. The sample also didn’t allow for examination of differences within the small number of Black adolescents who took part.

But Lisse says the study’s finding of such a stark and clear importance of hair satisfaction among Black adolescent girls so distinctly from their peers may be useful in both clinical and policy settings, where more awareness around cultural relevancy can help drive conversations about how to best provide interventions that meet the needs of diverse communities.

For example, interventions and empowerment programs specifically focused on exposing adolescent girls to positive messaging about hair and texture and providing natural hair education through videos may help to encourage hair satisfaction and reduce depression for Black adolescent girls.

Methods like Attachment tHAIRapy – which pairs traditional psychotherapy with hair care as a culturally relevant intervention to support positive self-worth – could provide useful guidance, Lisse suggests.

“This is something that we need to think about – what kind of tailored interventions can we put into place to mediate some of these effects that we see?” Lisse says.

“There has been more work within the last decade or so to kind of combat racial discrimination at work and school pertaining to hair,” she continues. “I think that this opens up a conversation about what more can be done, whether that’s things parents can do, or teachers can do within school, because a lot of the messaging that we see happens amongst peers as well.”

Her study contributes to a growing body of research that highlights the importance of understanding the impact of cultural factors on health, well-being, and addressing disparities, and more broadly, Lisse also hopes that other researchers will also prioritize investigation into culturally relevant factors, like hair satisfaction, into their work.

“Other researchers, as well, tailoring their own research and incorporating more culturally relevant, sociocultural factors like hair appearance in their research – I think that’s very necessary,” she says. “Because hair within body image research was not something that had been focused on, we missed out on so much research that could have been there when thinking about the body image conversation.”

In the future, Lisse plans to focus her own studies on how interventions can be culturally tailored – working on different interventions within marginalized groups to help reach adolescents and adults in clinical settings.

This research was supported by the National Institutes of Health (NICHD R21HDO65185) and the Bond-Mosher Graduate Fellowship in Clinical Psychology.