Abstract
The present research aimed to investigate whether retraining thin-beautiful associations could modify implicit beliefs relating thinness to beauty, increase me-beauty associations, and decrease explicit body anxiety in young women. In Experiment 1 (N = 180 women), participants were repeatedly exposed to beauty-related words paired with thin-related or large-related words on 50% (control) versus 75% (retraining) of trials. Implicit belief was assessed with a Relational Responding Task. In Experiment 2 (N = 195 women), me-beauty associations were assessed with a single-category Implicit Association Task, and body anxiety with a self-report measure. The implicit association measure remained unaffected by the retraining task. However, after retraining, women displayed weaker thin-is-beautiful implicit belief, Cohen’s <em>d</em> = 0.44, <em>CI<sub>95</sub></em>[0.14, 0.74], and less body anxiety, Cohen’s <em>d</em> = 0.34, <em>CI<sub>95</sub></em>[0.06, 0.63] than in the control condition. These results suggest that retraining thin-beautiful associations could reduce thin-is-beautiful implicit beliefs and decrease explicit body anxiety among women.
Highlights
Body Mass Index (BMI) was unrelated to the implicit belief that thin is beautiful, r(179) = –.09, p = 0.23
It should be kept in mind that the RRT was administered after the retraining task in both conditions, and that across conditions there were more large-beautiful than thin-beautiful word pairings
Summary and Conclusion In a social context in which weight is stigmatized, thinness is glorified, and the thin ideal is ubiquitous in media and advertisement, women have come to believe that their attractiveness depends in great part on their thinness
Summary
We aimed to extend and complement the findings reported by Martijn et al (2013), in which a retraining procedure based on the ‘(pictures of) supermodels – fake’ association was used
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