Body positive social media posts: who likes them anyway? The role of internalization and body dissatisfaction in the implicit and explicit bias towards thin-ideal social media posts

Body positive social media posts: who likes them anyway? The role of internalization and body dissatisfaction in the implicit and explicit bias towards thin-ideal social media posts | Research Square window.SnipcartSettings = { analytics: { enabled: false } }; (function() { var accessVector = localStorage.getItem('access_vector') || ''; window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || []; if (accessVector) { window.dataLayer.push({ user: { profile: { profileInfo: { snid: accessVector } } } }); } })(); (function(w,d,s,l,i){w[l]=w[l]||[];w[l].push({'gtm.start':new Date().getTime(),event:'gtm.js'});var f=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],j=d.createElement(s),dl=l!='dataLayer'?'&l='+l:'';j.async=true;j.src='https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtm.js?id='+i+dl;f.parentNode.insertBefore(j,f);})(window,document,'script','dataLayer','GTM-K279D39R'); Browse Preprints In Review Journals COVID-19 Preprints AJE Video Bytes Research Tools Research Promotion AJE Professional Editing AJE Rubriq About Preprint Platform In Review Editorial Policies Our Team Advisory Board Help Center Sign In Submit a Preprint Cite Share Download PDF Research Article Body positive social media posts: who likes them anyway? The role of internalization and body dissatisfaction in the implicit and explicit bias towards thin-ideal social media posts Adél Schein, Imre Tódor, Attila Varga, Beatrix Koronczai, Levente Álmos Szőcs, and 4 more This is a preprint; it has not been peer reviewed by a journal. https://doi.org/ 10.21203/rs.3.rs-3964504/v2 This work is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 License Status: Posted Version 2 posted You are reading this latest preprint version Show more versions Abstract Previous research demonstrated that body positive social media posts can foster body acceptance. However, the question arises about the susceptibility to body positive images and whether body positive social media posts can compensate for the harmful effects of unattainable beauty ideal internalization. This paper explored the role of internalization and trait body dissatisfaction in the implicit and explicit biases towards thin-ideal social media posts. We conducted two online studies (N = 673) with female participants of different age groups (adults, young adults, adolescents). Data was analyzed with path models. Results showed that in the adult and young adult samples, stronger internalization led to a more negative appreciation of body size, which was associated with a stronger implicit and explicit bias towards body-positive social media posts. However, in the adolescent sample, while internalization was directly positively related to the explicit bias towards thin-ideal posts, it was also positively associated with general body dissatisfaction that, in turn, was negatively related to the explicit bias towards thin-ideal posts. Our findings confirm that females with body image concerns are more susceptible to body positive posts that might compensate for the possible negative effects of internalization among (young) adults but not necessarily among adolescents. body positivity body dissatisfaction implicit bias internalization of body ideals social media Full Text Supplementary Files SupplementaryMaterial.docx Cite Share Download PDF Status: Posted Version 2 posted You are reading this latest preprint version Show more versions Research Square lets you share your work early, gain feedback from the community, and start making changes to your manuscript prior to peer review in a journal. As a division of Research Square Company, we’re committed to making research communication faster, fairer, and more useful. We do this by developing innovative software and high quality services for the global research community. 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