Effects of Instagram Body Portrayals on Attention, State Body Dissatisfaction, and Appearance Management Behavioral Intention

ABSTRACT

Research has suggested that Instagram is detrimental to one’s body image and health, as a result of its image-driven nature and the social comparisons that are commonly made between users’ bodies and the bodies they see portrayed. This study was designed to provide a better understanding of the effects of thin and fat body types portrayed in Instagram posts. This was done by examining how such body type portrayals influence attention to the posts, in addition to influencing outcomes such as body dissatisfaction and appearance management behavioral intentions. A total of 309 college students viewed 30 Instagram posts in an online experiment with a 2 (portrayed body type: thin vs. fat) X 15 (message repetition) within-subjects design. The findings indicate that thin-body portrayals increase audience self-reported attention to the posts and state body dissatisfaction, but female users who self-perceive themselves as fat report a similar level of attention to the posts regardless of portrayed body types. Additionally, Instagram use (defined as the number of photos users personally post) is found to moderate the effects of the body portrayals.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Five seconds was chosen to be consistent with the message processing framework, which indicates that an orienting response (i.e., short-term attention change in response to stimuli; OR) can be observed (by decreased heart rate) five seconds after encountering the stimuli that brought about the OR (Lang, 1994). It also helped keep participations from quickly skipping through the study without giving effort to the stimuli. The average time spent with the stimuli was entered as a covariate when testing the effects of the stimuli on self-reported attention. Before the analysis, any occasion where time spent on the stimulus viewing was more than 60 seconds was considered an outlier and removed. This was done because the outliers were spread across participants and stimuli, suggesting it was a rare and random occurrence rather than a repeated issue among particular participants or stimuli. As a result, an average of 7 outliers were removed for each stimulus. The average time spent with the stimuli in the thin-image condition was 8.83 seconds (SD = 2.84) and the average time spent with the stimuli in the fat-image condition was 9.05 seconds (SD = 3.08).

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.