Advertising, Effects on Adolescents

Body Image and Eating Disorders

Adolescence brings concerns about media's impact on eating disorders. The widespread incidence of anorexia (eating too little) and bulimia (inducing vomiting after overeating) has led scholars to examine media messages about body images. In American culture, physical attractiveness is linked to thinness. Analyses of Playboy centerfolds, female characters on television, women in magazine ads, and even Miss America contestants indicate that the ideal female form has become slimmer over the years. The increase in women's fitness magazines, the number of magazine articles about dieting and weight loss issues, and the number of advertisements for diet products illustrate further reinforcement of the thin ideal.

There are several explanations why advertisements and other media content are expected to influence adolescents' body image. Albert Bandura's social learning theory holds that attractive and rewarded characters are more likely to be modeled. So, adolescents are likely to try to look like the thin characters they see in the media. Leon Festinger's social comparison theory contends that people compare themselves to others they believe represent ideal or reasonable models. So, attraction to slim media characters and celebrities can be linked to body dissatisfaction, the drive for thinness, and symptoms of disordered eating.

Adolescent girls are believed to be especially susceptible to media influence on disordered eating. During puberty, estrogen causes adolescent girls to acquire more fat, especially in the breasts and hips. Adolescence is also a time when girls tend to view their bodies critically and begin to feel negatively about their physical appearance.

[Page 24]Researchers have found some connections between media use and disordered eating. Symptoms of eating disorders have been linked most consistently to thin female magazine models and fitness magazine reading. These effects are not direct, however—that is, scholars have not found that exposure to these models translates directly into eating disorders. Instead, exposure is linked to dissatisfaction with one's body, the drive to be thin, and various eating disorder symptomatology. Self-esteem appears to affect the relationship between exposure to thinness-promoting media content and development of eating disorders. Adolescent girls with lower self-esteem are more likely to be dissatisfied with their bodies and more likely to compare themselves with media images.

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