To Eat, Or Not To Eat

Photo by: Danielle Helm

               
Tumblr, a social blogging platform with an estimated 13 million users, recently took a stand against eating disorders.  With a frightening increase of self-hamring blogs and user content promoting eating disorders, the site placed a blanket ban on content outwardly promoting eating disorders.  While the site’s ability to regulate this new term of agreement is questionable at best, it brings to light eating disorders’ pervasiveness.  A recent study the Behavior Modification Journal, explored the sources of eating disorders and found, as to be expected, television advertisements to be the largest culprit.

The study consisted of two groups of women, one group containing 25 women with eating disorders and a second control group of 25 women without a history of eating disorders.  Of the eating disorder group, or ED group as the study labels it, 20 were diagnosed with bulimia nervosa, 3 were diagnosed.  The group without a history of eating disorders was used as the control group for the experiment.

                The actual experiment itself gauged the two groups’ reactions to two separate series of five minute advertisements selected by the scientists. One set of advertisements focused solely on beauty products that emphasized female beauty and slenderness. These beauty advertisements were intended to act as a stimulus for scientists to gauge thoughts of negative self image. The second set of ads were non beauty related and were for products like diapers and hammers. These were the control group used to evaluate the participants general reactions towards TV ads in general.

Before and after each group watched one of the five minute blocks of advertisements, they were given a series of questions that gauged their mood, emotions, thoughts of self worth, and body image.  After the beauty related advertisements specifically, the participants were asked to answer questions about the women in them.  They had to answer whether they thought the specific women were thinner than they were, their healthiness, and how happy they thought they would be in real life. These questions acted as a marker to relate the participants’ personal self image with how their perceptions of people who were considered thin and attractive.

The data between the two groups indicated, as to be expected, that the beauty ads emphasizing thinness created disproportionately negative thoughts of self worth for the eating disorder group.  Their emotions and rankings of self worth after were significantly lower than their starting point prior to viewing. They reported feeling unhappier, less attractive, and more hopeless than they did at the beginning of the experiment. The control group displayed similar results but with less emotional shift between their state before and after the ads. The non eating disorder group reported feeling noticeably happier than the eating disorder group prior to viewing and has comparatively less negative reactions after.  Though their reactions were less polarized, the data from the control group did provide obvious evidence that the beauty advertisements produced negative self image.

As a premise of the experiment, the scientists acted under the assumption that negative body image leads to eating disorders. Though this may be viewed as slightly presumptuous, they explain that psychological studies indicate a person’s body image has a direct correlation to their probability of developing eating disorders; the more negative a person’s body image, the more likely they are to engage in eating disorders. No, this is not terribly groundbreaking material, but as the premise for the experiment, it had to be explained in order to assess the scientists’ conclusion. Their hypothesis was that advertisements had the ability to explicitly dictate viewers’ body image, and they were wildly correct. All participants in the study indicated emotional and cognitive influence from the ads they watched. The beauty advertisements influenced the women negatively across the board. 

While the findings of the study were not necessarily unexpected, they play a major role in the overall issue of eating disorders. The study provides scientific evidence that television advertisements are pushing viewers towards unhealthy lifestyles. Sites like Tumblr who wish to prevent eating disorders’ proliferation, can use the study’s evidence to back their blanket ban of images promoting anorexia.  Though the results may be considered common knowledge to a degree, that knowledge is now validated and peer reviewed. Now it carries force. 

Works Cited

Legenbaure, Tanja. Ruhl, Ilka. “Influence of Appearance-Related TV Commercials on Body Image State” Behavior Modification. 7 April 2010. Web. 14  March 2012.