Building Resilience to Negative Effects of Thin-Ideal Media

Many of us, and by “us” I mean college-aged women who read fashion magazines, have looked at an advertisement and felt disgusted and guilty about our lack of exercise, obsession with junk food, or general feelings of being unsatisfactory. It seems hard to believe that just flipping through these ads could produce such strong feelings, but research indicates that they do. In the current study we investigate interventions to attenuate these negative effects; the two interventions include a media literacy TED talk (lead by Jean Kilbourne) and a self-compassion meditation (lead by Kristin Neff). 450 college women participated in this study. Two-thirds of them were exposed to an intervention; the rest were used as a control group. Half of each group was exposed to a set of advertisements considered to highlight a thin-ideal and the others were exposed to neutral advertisements. After advertisement exposure, participants were asked a variety of questions which included, but were not limited to, body satisfaction, self-esteem, and current self-compassion levels. Results of this study did not find clear support for either intervention. This may be due, however, to a fault in the thin-ideal media manipulation.