Automatic evaluation of body-related words among young women: an experimental study

Abstract

BackgroundPrevious research has demonstrated that exposure to images depicting the thin female ideal has negative effects on some females' levels of body dissatisfaction. Much of this research, however, has utilised relatively long stimulus exposure times; thereby focusing on effortful and conscious processing of body-related stimuli. Relatively little is known about the nature of females' affective responses to the textual components of body-related stimuli, especially when these stimuli are only briefly encountered. The primary aim of the current research was to determine whether young women automatically evaluate body-related words and whether these responses are associated with body image concerns, including self-reported levels of appearance schematicity, thin internalisation, body dissatisfaction, and dietary restraint.MethodsAn affective priming task was used to investigate whether females automatically evaluate body-related words, and whether this is associated with self-reported body image concerns. In a within-participants experimental design, the valence congruence of the prime and target pairs was manipulated. Participants selected body words as primes in Experiment 1 (N = 27), while normatively selected body words were primes in Experiment 2 (N = 50). Each prime was presented briefly, followed by a target word which participants judged as "good" or "bad". The dependent variable was response latency to the target.ResultsAutomatic evaluation was evident: responding to congruent pairs was faster than responding to incongruent pairs. Body image concerns were unrelated to automaticity.ConclusionsThe findings suggest that brief encounters with body words are likely to prompt automatic evaluation in all young women, and that this process proceeds unintentionally and efficiently, without conscious guidance.

What words should we use to talk about weight? A systematic review of quantitative and qualitative studies examining preferences for weight‐related terminology

“…The words used to refer to people's body weight can affect their self‐perceptions, attitudes and behaviours. Experimental research shows that even a brief exposure to body‐related words can induce automatic evaluations and judgements of body shape and weight, and trigger negative affective responses . These negative, and often implicit, associations are a symptom of broader societal weight stigma, so pervasive that recent evidence points to the globalization and presence of weight stigma in both developed and developing countries around the world …”

Decreasing body dissatisfaction using a brief conditioning intervention

“…For example, individuals with body dissatisfaction automatically compare their bodies to others in generally unfavorable ways (Want, 2009). Likewise, Watts and Cranney (2010) observed that women automatically associate thin bodies with "good" and larger bodies with "bad" and have argued that these evaluations are often hard to change (Watts, Cranney, & Gleitzman, 2008). Jansen, Nederkoorn, and Mulkens (2005) found that women with body dissatisfaction automatically attend to their self-defined unfavorable body parts and to what they considered the most beautiful parts in other women; non-BD women showed the exact opposite selective attention pattern.…”

‘Large Is Beautiful!’ Associative Retraining Changes Implicit Beliefs About Thinness and Beauty and Decreases Women’s Appearance Anxiety

“…Recent experimental evidence suggests that these effects can occur unconsciously and in a resource-independent manner Chatard et al, 2017). Consistent with this idea, it has been demonstrated that young women tend to automatically evaluate body-related images (Watts et al, 2008; see also Watts & Cranney, 2010), as reflected in an affective prime task. This task involves categorizing target stimuli as positive or negative, each target stimulus being preceded by a prime pretested as positive or negative.…”