Body Image Self-Esteem And Social Media Analysis

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In today’s society women are constantly confronted with the public’s high set standards of beauty and the perfect body. As young women of the college-age are transforming into more mature women, they are often found as a target audience for social media’s constant advertisement of the ideal woman. Consequences of such actions have reciprocated effecting the self-esteem of this specific age range of females. Bessenoff (2006) hypothesized that, “women with high levels of body image self-discrepancy were more likely to engage in social comparison from exposure to thin-ideal advertisements, as well as more likely to have those comparison processes induce self-directed negative consequences” (p.239). Bessenoff (2006) as a mixed-method study, therefore, …show more content…
Fernandez and Pritchard (2012) similar to that of Bessenoff (2006), specified the impact media models have on college students’ perception of thinness and the ideal body, in turn, damaging their self esteem. “The aim of the present study was to examine what media factors relate to drive for thinness in collegiate men and women, and if those predictors are the same between the sexes” (p.322). Research by Yamamiya, Cash, Melnyk, Posavac, and Posavac (2004) like the two studies aforementioned, focused on the differences in the specific role the amount of exposure plays to thin and beautiful body images on internalization and mood. Depending on the level of exposure to social media’s advocating influence of ideal models, the self-internalization of young women correlate. Comparing the subject procedures in all three studies analyzed, the size amount of participants was similar, but the demographic and descriptive variables were unique in all three …show more content…
Overall individual studies’ results were concluded that modern media has thoroughly and negatively influenced young women so much to the extent that judgment on body-image is routine influencing self-esteem unfavorably. Yamamiya et al. (2004) “indicate[d] that even a 5 min exposure to thin-and-beautiful media images results in a more negative body image state than does exposure to images of neutral objects, particularly among young women with high media-ideal internalization levels and social comparison tendencies” (p.78). Advertisements of models and the push on being the perfect weight, size and overall woman, evidently present harmful internalizations for women especially of the college age. Agreeing with these results, Fernandez and Pritchard (2012) discovered that, “the only media variables that significantly related to drive for thinness in women after controlling for social self-esteem were the influence of media models on body image and societal pressure” (p.323). In this case, neutral advertisements exposed to participants did not associate a personal internalization effecting high or low self esteem. Bessenoff (2006) likewise concluded that, “high self-discrepant women were more likely to experience depressive symptoms, negative mood, and weight regulatory thoughts from this
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