Online and offline body image concerns may be mutually reinforcing. Image credit: LN_Photoart
By Katie Yoon
Body image concerns are known to spike in adolescence and are known to be associated with social media use (see this related Winston National Center [WNC] Study Summary). Here at the WNC, we are working to better understand how adolescents’ everyday body image influences their worries about how they appear online, and vice-versa: how concerns about online appearance could affect overall body image.
The WNC’s Winston Family Distinguished Fellow, Professor Anne Maheux led a study surveying nearly 1,600 Florida eighth graders multiple times over the course of an academic year. The adolescents answered body image-related questions designed to measure how much their sense of self-worth is based on feeling and looking attractive, how much they engage in self-objectification by considering how others view their bodies, and how happy they are about their appearance in their everyday lives. They also provided information about how much time they spent on social media and the degree to which they are concerned about their physical appearance in social media photos. These data provided insight on how the students’ appearance concerns develop over time in both online and offline settings.
The study found that online and offline appearance concerns were mutually reinforcing over time. Specifically, increasing concerns about online appearance predicted teens feeling worse about their offline appearance and increasingly basing their self-worth on how they look. Feeling worse about their offline appearance also predicted greater concern for their online appearance. This means that teens’ offline appearance concerns can influence their online appearance concerns, which can, in turn, affect their offline appearance, creating a cycle of growing appearance concerns.
The study also explored gender differences in these associations. Researchers found that girls tend to be at a greater risk of both online and offline appearance concerns than boys. The effects of those appearance concerns, however, appeared to be similar for boys and girls, as heightened online and offline appearance concerns were associated with later worse well-being and body image regardless of gender.
Findings from this study support the growing body of research that suggests social media use is associated with negative body image among adolescents and that girls may be at higher risk of experiencing body image concerns both online and offline. Increasing online and offline body image concerns may have implications for later adolescent and adult body image and mental health, so it is important to disrupt the harmful developmental processes through intervention efforts.
Considerations
This study was conducted with adolescents in a single U.S. school district and may not generalize to other populations. Additionally, body image processes and development occur across several years, so a longer term study may provide more insight into the associations between online and offline body image.
Article reference
Maheux, A. J., Burnell, K., & Choukas-Bradley, S. (2024). Bidirectional associations between online and offline appearance concerns during early-to-middle adolescence. Developmental Psychology, 60(10), 1885–1901.