Disclaimer Labels Used in Ads: An Eye-Tracking Study Exploring Body Dissatisfaction and Physical Appearance Comparison Among University Students

Abstract

The necessity of having a perfect beauty created with advertisements has negative impacts on young people. Advertisements usually feature very slim models and their digitally altered, airbrushed and trimmed photos. Ideal beauty is created by retouching and changing digitally existing images. People compare their bodies to the perfect bodies in advertisements. Especially young women and men compare these perfect bodies with their own bodies and experience dissatisfaction. This may lead to anxiety, depression and lack of self-confidence in people who are not ideally sized. Since ideal beauty influences the audience, the physical attractiveness of people starring in advertisements is one of the subjects worth stressing. With an experimental design, the eye movements of young female (40) and male (40) participants were recorded using the eye-tracking method. During this process, participants saw advertisements with and without disclaimer labels. The male participants saw the print advertisement which included the male model, and the female participants saw the print advertisement which included the female model. At the end of the experiment, the Body Dissatisfaction Scale (BDS) and the Physical Appearance Comparison Scale (PACS) were applied to the participants. The relationship between the participants’ levels of body dissatisfaction and physical appearance comparison and their focus on Areas of Interest (AOI) in stimulated and non-stimulated advertising was revealed. The findings of the study showed that body dissatisfaction is high among young people and the level of body dissatisfaction did not affect more attention to any part of the model (body and face).