This was a research paper written in 1997, which might be from a different time but could still be useful for finding more information. What they really wanted to do was conduct a test to see the most predictable way to view college women and their issues with food; they looked at magazine exposure, awareness of appearance ideals, and the internalization of ideas put out by the media. The participants in this study were 175 college women aged 18 to 49.
They measured this through exposure to popular magazines and the number of different body types in the images they presented. They realized that there is a lot of body dissatisfaction and a drive for thinness, as well as some behaviors having to do with bulimia; it is also clear that because of this, there is also lower self-esteem.
What they saw was that, even with just exposure, there are few links to body dissatisfaction, eating symptoms, and lower self-esteem. The awareness saw some problems, but not very deep ones, and internalization was found to be the stronger predictor because of how they start to look at their bodies.
This leads to greater risk because these women start to believe this is actually the ideal, and it becomes their reality. This leads to a new way of cognitive reconstruction and to different appearance beliefs further.
This investigation, however, has one large limitation: the investigation pool is somewhat limited to a precise group of women who are all in the same environment because they all attend the same university.
This really shows me that it is not just the exposure, but also the way our brain actually takes it in and thinks about it in different ways. I think it is important to look at the fact that it is more than just the story we are told; it is also our relationship to that story.
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