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Promotion of Ultra-thin Image in Media is Hurting Women

by Rajshri on May 14 2008 3:22 PM

The "ultra-thin" image promoted by the media in the minds of today's women is adversely affecting their health, a new study says.

As media images glamorizing the extremely thin continue to rule newspaper and magazine covers, an increased number of women are becoming worried over their bodies and are therefore, engaging in unhealthy eating behaviors, such as excessive dieting.

Now, in a new study by University of Wisconsin-Madison postdoctoral researcher Shelly Grabe and psychology professor Janet Hyde, the experts have reported some of the most definitive findings yet on how these images affect women.

In the May issue of Psychological Bulletin, the scientists describe a sweeping analysis of 77 previous studies involving more than 15,000 subjects.

In it, they found that exposure to media depicting ultra-thin actresses and models significantly increased women's concerns about their bodies.

Although on one level the results seem obvious, Grabe believes many people still resist the idea that a societal influence, like the media, can have a real impact on how women view themselves.

When individual experiments have found this relationship in the past, she explains, critics have often dismissed them for focusing on groups of particularly body-conscious women, such as college students, or exposing test subjects to unusually racy photos.

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Grabe and Hyde, in contrast, analyzed data from every well-designed study on the topic they could find, thus avoiding much of this criticism.

"We've demonstrated that it doesn't matter what the exposure is, whether it's general TV watching in the evening, or magazines, or ads showing on a computer," says Grabe.

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"If the image is appearance-focused and sends a clear message about a woman's body as an object, then it's going to affect women," she adds.

The effect also appears to be growing. The researchers' analysis reveals that, on average, studies conducted in the 2000s show a larger influence of the media on women's body image than do those from the 1990s, says Grabe.

"This suggests that despite all our efforts to teach women and girls to be savvy about the media and have healthy body practices, the media's effect on how much they internalize the thin ideal is getting stronger," she says.

The results are troubling because recent research has established body dissatisfaction as a major risk factor for low self-esteem, depression, obesity, and eating disorders, such as bulimia.

At the same time, women's displeasure with their bodies has become so common that it's now considered normal, says Grabe. She hopes that wider recognition of the media's role will encourage people to see the issue as a societal one, rather than as a problem of individual omen as it's viewed now.

"I think we need to consider how we're using media images as a culture to share the values we think are important, and the effect that has on our well-being, " she says.

The approach Grabe and Hyde took in their study, called meta-analysis, offers a way to quantitatively examine an entire body of research at once.

In their case, this meant 77 carefully selected studies of the effects of appearance-focused media images on women's body dissatisfaction, investment in their looks, adoption of the thin ideal, and eating behaviors and beliefs.

The analysis also included controlled, experimental studies, in which these effects were tested directly, and investigations that correlated body concerns with women's self-reported consumption of media.

In simple terms, the meta-analysis placed test subjects from every study into two groups: those who were exposed to media images portraying women's bodies and the thin ideal, and those who weren't. It then asked whether differences existed between the two and the agnitude of the differences.

In the end, the researchers did find a significant difference, with women who were exposed to media reporting less satisfaction with their bodies. Notably, this difference was also seen across all four measures of body image concerns.

Source-ANI
RAS/L


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