The Media and Female Body Image

There's a paper by Grabe, Ward, and Hyde in this month's issue of Psychological Bulletin that presents a meta-analysis of 77 studies (correlational and experimental) on the relationship between the media's presentation of (overly) thin women and women's body image issues (from the shrink rap). The studies used a host of measures of body image, including measures of things like perceived body shape, anoretic cognition, body dissatisfaction, thin-ideal internalization, restrained eating, "bulimic symptomatology," appearance self-esteem, etc. For the relationship between media presentations of thin women and these various constructs, the average effect sizes ranged from -.28 to -.39, indicating small to moderate relationships.

If you have a subscription, you can read the paper here. Unfortunately, I can't find a free version of the paper anywhere, but if you really want to read it (remember, meta-analyses are boring as hell), send me an email.

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Hi,

Thanks for alerting people to this interesting piece of research. I'm going to be doing an episode for my podcast on body image. If you could send me a copy that would be great. Appreciate it.

Michael

this article helps me a lot in doing my reaction paper. nice..

By mi amore pot, (not verified) on 02 Aug 2008 #permalink

Could you please send me this paper to smgalleg@asu.edu. Im working on research related to body image. Thanks!