What’s not to like? Enhancing Women’s Body Satisfaction by means of an Evaluative Conditioning Procedure with Positive Social Media Feedback.

DOI

The prevalence of a negative body image among women is high. Because of its serious consequences for individuals’ mental health, there is an urgent need to improve current body image interventions. Recent studies using evaluative conditioning to strengthen the association between women’s body and positive (social) stimuli have shown promising results. In two experimental studies, we tested whether incorporating more age appropriate positive social stimuli as unconditioned stimuli (USs) can strengthen the conditioning procedure as a means to enhance women’s body satisfaction. In the experimental condition, participants’ body pictures were systematically followed by the Facebook like-button and youthful smiling faces (study 1, experimental condition: n = 68; control condition: n = 67) or positive Emojis (study 2, experimental condition: n = 64; control condition: n = 67). The results indicated that neither conditioning procedure enhanced participants’ body satisfaction more than a control procedure, and in both studies, there was no valence transfer from the positive USs to the body pictures. Thus, incorporation of age appropriate USs did not result in the anticipated conditioning effects. These findings challenge the utility of current evaluative conditioning procedures as an intervention technique to address a negative body image.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.34894/FKOROH
Related Identifier https://doi.org/10.1177/20438087221085767
Metadata Access https://dataverse.nl/oai?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_datacite&identifier=doi:10.34894/FKOROH
Provenance
Creator Masselman, Irina; Glashouwer, Klaske A. ORCID logo; De Jong, Peter J. ORCID logo
Publisher DataverseNL
Contributor Groningen Digital Competence Centre
Publication Year 2022
Rights CC0 Waiver; info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess; https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
OpenAccess true
Contact Groningen Digital Competence Centre (University of Groningen)
Representation
Resource Type Dataset
Format application/x-spss-sav; application/x-spss-syntax
Size 49069; 15574; 53875; 29869
Version 1.0
Discipline Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Aquaculture; Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Aquaculture and Veterinary Medicine; Life Sciences; Social Sciences; Social and Behavioural Sciences; Soil Sciences