Body Positive Media Exposure and College-Aged Women: Impacts on Body Image, Self-Worth, and Body Dissatisfaction

The present study assessed the impact of body positive (BP) social media content on body image (BI), self-worth (SW), and body dissatisfaction (BD) using a pre-post design. Female college students (n = 140) filled out Time 1 questionnaires 1-2 weeks prior to the lab session, in which they were randomly assigned to view a) the body positivity (BP) blog or b) control blog for 10 minutes before filling out the Time 2 questionnaire. Researchers hypothesized that participants in the BP condition would have greater improvement on outcome measures, compared to the control condition. Researchers also hypothesized that any improvement observed in the BP condition would be moderated by current ED symptomatology and previous ED history, as a result of social identification theory. Results showed that while both conditions demonstrated improvement for BI, the BP condition showed significantly greater improvement. Among women of color in the BP condition BD also improved significantly, but we did not see this same effect with whites in the BP condition. Subsequent analyses demonstrate that current ED symptomatology accounts for a statistically significant amount of the variance (3.9%) in BI scores for those in the BP condition. Overall, results suggest that exposure to BP content can improve body image for college females, and that this improvement is impacted by current ED symptomatology.