Most people think that advertising has no influence on them. If this were true why would companies spend over $200 billion a year on advertising (Kilbourne)? Many people, too, could argue that the media and advertisements have no influence on teenage dieting and unhealthy eating habits. This too was proven false. A study in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence, titled, “The Effects of ‘Thin Ideal’ Television Commercials in Body Dissatisfaction and Schema Activation During Early Adolescence,” successfully supports that the use of thin women in the media is a problem. The purpose of this study was to find out how a teenage girl views her body image after watching a number of commercials which contain women of the ideal beauty. Adolescents age 13 -15 viewed 20 commercials. Half containing idealized female thin images and half without. Body dissatisfaction was measured before, immediately following, and 15 minutes after commercial viewing, in order to detect a change. Body dissatisfaction was measured by using a scale labeled from “none” to “very much” and participants were asked to indicate how they felt at that time on two dimensions: Weight dissatisfaction and overall appearance dissatisfaction by placing a small mark on the appropriate lines.
In addition to body dissatisfaction, the researchers of the study also sought to assess the activation of appearance schema. Cognitive- processing models of body image suggest that individuals develop appearance schema, which are assumptions and generalization about ones appearance. Although everyone possesses an appearance schema, not all individuals possess these schema to the same degree. This is why not every girl who watches a commercial with a thin, attractive model develops an eating disorder (Hargreaves and Tiggermann). Schema activation was measured by the word-stem completion task. In this task, participants were presented with 20 three letter word-stems that could be completed to form both appearance-related and non-appearance-related words. For example, SLE-could be completed as slender or sleep or sled; PRE-could be completed as pretty or present or pretend; and CEL-could be completed as cellulite or cell or cello. The task was scored by summing the number of appearance words generated. This would therefore show them that after watching the commercial with a thin model in it, their minds were occupied with nothing but thoughts about their personal appearance.
Another way they measured appearance schema was asking the participants to indicate their level of agreement with 14 statements. For example, "Attractive people have it all"; "What I look like is an important part of who I am"; and "If I could look just as I wish, my life would be much happier.” It was measured on a scale of 1 being stongly disagree and 5 being strongly agree. By compiling all the collected data, an overall statement was able to be made about the effect the use of the ideal beauty in commercials has on the self esttem of teenage girls. The results support the general hypothesis that: televised images of attractiveness lead to increased body dissatisfaction and is activated for girls as young as 13 years old! Their body dissatisfaction, which is especially prevalent during adolescence, has been reported by a majority of girls feeling overweight and express a desire to be thinner. 19% of women are actually overweight while 91% think that they need to lose weight (Dove). This has been implicated in the development of restrictive eating, binge eating, or bulimic tendencies.
Consequences
LaurenSmithFinalProject
Page was generated in 0.0942 seconds