Date of Submission
Spring 2018
Academic Programs and Concentrations
Psychology; Psychology
Project Advisor 1
Richard Gordon, PhD
Project Advisor 2
Tom Cain, PhD
Abstract/Artist's Statement
Eating disorders have demonstrated the most extreme rise in prevalence out of all the mental illnesses since 1990 (Lozano et al., 2012). However, research has largely neglected to investigate cross-cultural effects on disordered eating, and thus, findings may only apply to Western samples. Only two known prior studies have investigated effects of social media on disordered eating cross-culturally. This project helps fill a substantial research gap by examining social media effects on body image concerns in a culturally diverse sample of Australian undergraduate women (N= 185). The effect of a ten-minute Facebook exposure on women’s body dissatisfaction and appearance comparison tendencies will be investigated, while considering a possible moderating effect of ethnicity. Utilizing a pre-/post-exposure pseudo-experimental design, it was predicted that Asian Australian participants (n=92) would experience a ten-minute Facebook exposure differently than European Australian participants (n=93). Regression analyses revealed that, in general, the brief Facebook exposure pseudo-experimentally increased body image concerns for the European Australians, but the Asian Australians remained seemingly unaffected. Interestingly, the groups significantly differed in the amount of appearance comparisons to different groups; i.e. the European Australians reported significantly more appearance comparisons made on Facebook to celebrities than the Asian Australians. These findings reinforce and extend the central tenets of the Tripartite Influence Model, and suggest necessary future directions for research on social media and disordered eating across diverse populations.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Brown, Haley E., "The Effect of Facebook on Body Dissatisfaction: Ethnicity as a Possible Moderator" (2018). Senior Projects Spring 2018. 197.
https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2018/197
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