Abstract

Media’s prevailing thin-body ideal plays a vital role in adolescent girls’ body image development, but the co-occurring impact of peer feedback is understudied. The present study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to test media imagery and peer feedback combinations on neural activity related to thin-body ideals. Twenty-four healthy female late adolescents rated precategorized body sizes of bikini models (too thin or normal), directly followed by ostensible peer feedback (too thin or normal). Consistent with prior studies on social feedback processing, results showed increased brain activity in the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC)/anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and bilateral insula in incongruent situations: when participants rated media models’ body size as normal while peer feedback indicated the models as too thin (or vice versa). This effect was stronger for girls with lower self-esteem. A subsequent behavioral study (N = 34 female late adolescents, separate sample) demonstrated that participants changed behavior in the direction of the peer feedback: precategorized normal sized models were rated as too thin more often after receiving too thin peer feedback. This suggests that the neural responses upon peer feedback may influence subsequent choice. Our results show that media-by-peer interactions have pronounced effects on girls’ body ideals.

Highlights

  • Media’s prevailing thin-body ideal plays a vital role in adolescent girls’ body image development, but the cooccurring impact of peer feedback is understudied

  • This is well exemplified by the development of body image in late adolescent girls

  • This judgment was followed by ostensible peer feedback, which could be congruent or incongruent with the participant’s answer (i.e., BI expect to be accepted,^ followed by peer feedback signaling acceptance [congruent] or rejection [incongruent])

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Summary

Introduction

Media’s prevailing thin-body ideal plays a vital role in adolescent girls’ body image development, but the cooccurring impact of peer feedback is understudied. Consistent with prior studies on social feedback processing, results showed increased brain activity in the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC)/anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and bilateral insula in incongruent situations: when participants rated media models’ body size as normal while peer feedback indicated the models as too thin (or vice versa). This effect was stronger for girls with lower self-esteem. Neural measures can complement self-report measures in predicting behavior (Berkman & Falk, 2013) and reveal mechanisms that are not apparent otherwise (see Falk, 2010)

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