Can the Media Affect Us?

"Can the Media Affect Us? Social Comparison, Self-Discrepancy, and the Thin Ideal" was written by Gayle R. Bessenoff and was published in Psychology of Women Quarterly on 1 September, 2006. In this journal article, Bessenoff discusses the common factor between body dissatisfaction and thin-ideal internalization is social comparison. Then Bessenoff creates three hypotheses and tests them using a group of 112 girls. The girl's ages were between 17  to 39 years old. Bessenoff next creates two groups based off the girl's level of body image self-discrepancy and then were tested using one of the two experimental conditions. The results concluded was that social comparison fully meditated only the relationship between the symptoms of depression and the exposure to thin-ideal advertisements, but social comparison only partly helped meditate the relationship between weight-related thoughts and thin-ideal advertisements.

I chose this journal article because I am discussing body dissatisfaction in my paper and this provided good research about it. Also, the experiment tested was really interesting and I may be able to include it in my paper to give more details for a possible solution to the problem.