摘要
Past research examining the content of media programming has demonstrated that women in the media tend to have to conform to certain beauty and body standards in order to succeed. Because this thin ideal is so weU-documented, there has been an interest in examining the effects of those portrayals on media consumers. Results from experimental studies suggest that the media can play an important role in causing body dissatisfaction among women. This research looks to build upon prior studies by exploring the role of familiarity with the mediated image in causing body dissatisfaction. Results suggest that in line with prior research, unfamiliar images of skinny women and moderately overweight women influenced women so that they felt worse about themselves. A similar result was obtained with familiar images of skinny celebrities. Familiar images of overweight celebrities, though, did not cause body dissatisfaction. Implications from these results are discussed.
