Angel Saavedra Cisneros and Dr. Matthew Spackman, Psychology
Body image is only one of different aspects that make up what is known as “self-image.” That is, the way we view ourselves as a whole by ourselves and in reference to others. Having a healthy self-image is important to overall wellbeing in many individuals. Having a healthy body-image is a very important part of self-image healthiness; the comparisons we subject our body-image to are also important to our self image.
Self and body-image are often closely related to self-esteem, as well as depression and anxiety. Therefore, we can see the importance of healthy self and body-images.
The way we view our body and thus the image we form about it is significantly influenced by the cultural standard for beauty, which we learn from many different sources. Family, peers, and different cultural factors help shape this beauty standard; nevertheless it is commonly accepted that media plays a leading role in defining the standard of beauty.
Media, through the different visual forms portray an ideal of thinness for women and a muscular ideal for men. Movies and TV use attractive models as their actors. Advertisements also represent an important area in which people, specifically, good looking people, are used to make a product or service more attractive to the potential buyers. Many of the models used in media compel with the beauty ideal, yet the average person does not fit this ideal and this causes a discrepancy that is manifested as lowered body-image satisfaction, which can lead to an impoverished self-image that can bring depression, self-esteem, and anxiety problems for these people.
Many researchers have conducted experimental procedures in order to try to determine if media can directly affect people’s body-image, self esteem and depression. There are mixed results in the literature and one conclusion that has been consistent is that the type of media and the differences between the images themselves play a very important role in how much they affect the viewers.
For this research it was decided that magazine images would be the best in order to have significant measurable effects. The images used would be presented as advertisements in order to have a cover up story so that the participants weren’t fully aware of what we were trying to study. After deciding what images to use the researchers decided that to use actual images was the easiest way to conduct the experiment, for creating fake advertisements would be too time consuming and we could get almost the same results from using actual magazine advertisements. Two sets of images would be chosen to show during the experimental phase, one called “non body-centered” and the other “body-centered.” These would be shown to two different groups, the non body-centered to the control group and the body-centered to the experimental group. This will provide us with more means to determine whether media images affect people’s self ideas.
There were two main phases for this research, the first one, conducted during summer 2004 after finally receiving IRB approval, was to determine which images would be selected for each group. There was an original pool of 50 advertisements selected from lifestyle, fashion, and men’s and women’s fitness magazines. These were then presented to a total of 45 participants for them to rate on six different questions, all of these questions but one addressed the human models in the advertisements, the last question asked whether the ad was effective in making them want to purchase the product or not. From there the final 15 that would be shown to each group were chosen. The results showed that the advertisements fell across a wide range of scores, the lowest scores (least body centered with less focus on body) were selected for the control group and the highest (most attractive) for the experimental group. One interesting finding from this procedure was that all of the questions were similar to each other except the last one when subjected to a factor analysis. We can infer from this data that the attractiveness of the models used and how much focus is put on them is not related to how effective the ad is.
In order to contribute to the previous research done on the topic it was hypothesized that media would affect people differently across individuals, we defined these groups to be different in their BMI scores. The second phase consisted of recruiting participants (from undergraduate psychology courses) to participate by filling out a series of questionnaires designed to measure self-esteem (concurrent and ongoing), depression and anxiety. The participants were divided into 3 different BMI groups from self-reported height and weight data after they filled out the first series of questionnaires. There were 240 participants for this part of the research, 150 females and 90 males. As part of the research, the participants were asked to return for a second session in order to complete their experimental participation.
The participants were asked to come to different sessions for the second part of the experiment. Here they were asked to rate a set of advertisements and then fill out the questionnaires they were given earlier. The return rate was very low because there was only one researcher and the research times had to accommodate to his availability. Also because we used the available funds to give movie passes to the participants as compensation and we only had 150 available, we expected 120 participants and only contacted 160. We tried to fill a quota of 10 participants per subgroup and conducted research sessions up to finals week hoping to fill it. We did not fill the quota but have decided to conduct our data analysis with the available data.
Due to the amount of data and the time when we decided to stop conducting research sessions the data analysis has not been yet completed, but more details will be submitted in this report once it is done. The results will be reported through my honors thesis which will be submitted in June 2005.