Abstract
Media’s prevailing thin-body ideal plays a vital role in adolescent girls’ body image development, but the co-occurring impact of peer feedback is understudied. The present study used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to test media imagery and peer feedback combinations on neural activity related to thin-body ideals. Twenty-four healthy female late adolescents rated pre-categorized body sizes of bikini models (‘too thin’ or ‘normal’), directly followed by ostensible peer feedback (‘too thin’ or ‘normal’). Consistent with prior studies on social feedback processing, results showed increased brain activity in the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC)/anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and bilateral insula in incongruent situations: when participants rated media models’ body size as ‘normal’ while peer feedback indicated the models as ‘too thin’ (or vice versa). This effect was stronger for girls with lower self-esteem. A subsequent behavioral study (N=34 female late adolescents, separate sample) demonstrated that participants changed behavior in the direction of the peer feedback: pre-categorized ‘normal’ sized models were rated as ‘too thin’ more often after receiving ‘too thin’ peer feedback. This suggests that the neural responses upon peer feedback may influence subsequent choice. Our results show that media-by-peer interactions have pronounced effects on girls’ body-ideals.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 712–723 |
Number of pages | 12 |
Journal | Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience |
Volume | 17 |
Issue number | 4 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 1 Aug 2017 |
Funding
The authors thank Gèr Steffens (Utrecht University, NL) for his help in selecting and pretesting the model imagery sets that are used in this study. We also thank Anna van Steenbergen (Leiden University, NL) for collecting the data in Experiment 2. This study was supported by the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies (NIAS/KNAW, Amsterdam, NL; fellowships for both E.A.K. and E.A.C.) and a VICI grant by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) awarded to the last author (NWO-VICI 453-14-001 E.A.C.)
Funders | Funder number |
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Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies | |
Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences | |
Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen | |
Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek | NWO-VICI 453-14-001 |