Elsevier

Body Image

Volume 35, December 2020, Pages 181-191
Body Image

Body Positivity (#BoPo) in everyday life: An ecological momentary assessment study showing potential benefits to individuals’ body image and emotional wellbeing

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bodyim.2020.09.003Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Viewing BodyPositivity (BoPo) was associated with greater body satisfaction.

  • Viewing BoPo was associated with lower negative affect and greater positive affect.

  • Effect sizes for these associations were small: Cohen’s ds = |0.03–0.06|.

  • Instagram accounted for nearly half of all BoPo exposures.

  • The everyday experience of BoPo seems beneficial for psychological well-being.

Abstract

Experimental studies of Body Positivity (BoPo), referring to social media content that challenges status-quo beauty ideals by portraying and promoting diverse physical appearances, are suggestive of mental health benefits. To date, no research has examined BoPo using naturalistic study designs that maximise ecological validity. Undergraduate students (N = 113, 83.2 % female, 26.6 % White) completed a 1-week, smartphone-facilitated ecological momentary assessment protocol containing self-report measures of state body satisfaction, state affective functioning, and BoPo exposure. Students also reported the social media platforms where their BoPo exposures occurred. Our main finding was that students exposed to BoPo subsequently reported higher levels of body satisfaction (Cohen’s d = 0.05, small) and positive affect (d = 0.06, small), together with lower negative affect (d = −0.03, small). Instagram accounted for half of all BoPo exposures (46.1 %), followed by Facebook (17.4 %), Youtube (8.9 %), and Snapchat (8.9 %). Conclusions were three-fold: (i) viewing BoPo may lead people to experience higher body satisfaction and improved emotional wellbeing, (ii) Instagram is a particularly important social media platform for BoPo exposures, and (iii) encouraging social media users to follow BoPo social media accounts may be a useful way to protect and enhance users’ body image and emotional wellbeing, pending further research.

Introduction

Cultural beauty standards are a major reason why individuals develop poor body image. Such standards are unrealistic and often impossible to satisfy, creating ample opportunities for individuals to negatively compare themselves against exemplars of these standards (e.g., Rogers, Fuller-Tyszkiewicz, Lewis, Krug, & Richardson, 2017). Research on mass media (e.g., television and movies) has shown that individuals’ self-comparisons to media-idealised depictions of physical beauty tends to harm their psychological well-being (Hargreaves & Tiggemann, 2004). However, in the past 15 years, the advent and tremendous popularity of social media (e.g., Instagram and Facebook), together with the global uptake of smartphones and other smart devices, has fundamentally altered the media landscape and attracted considerable public scrutiny and research attention.

Social media platforms that are predominantly image-focused, otherwise known as image-centric social media (e.g., Instagram), are of greater concern for body image than non-image-centric social media (e.g., Wordpress; Griffiths, Murray, Krug, & McLean, 2018). Image-centric social media affords greater opportunities for individuals to engage in the processes theorised to generate body dissatisfaction and related psychopathology, such as appearance comparisons (Fardouly & Vartanian, 2015). Among men and women, the relationships of social media with body dissatisfaction and eating disorder symptoms are stronger for frequent users of image-centric social media than frequent users of non-image centric social media (Fardouly & Vartanian, 2016; Griffiths, Castle et al., 2018; Meier & Gray, 2014). Image-centric social media may also attract comments, captions, and other forms of social commentary that amplify or otherwise modify the effects of viewing image-based social media content. In recent years, however, there has emerged a class of image-centric social media content that may – in theory – improve individuals’ relationships with their physical appearance, and in particular, their body size and shape: Body Positivity, or “BoPo”.

BoPo seeks to challenge narrow and restrictive beauty ideals through positive portrayals of diverse body shapes and sizes, with the overarching aim of promoting body appreciation and acceptance (Cohen, Fardouly, Newton-John, & Slater, 2019; Caruso & Roberts, 2018; Cohen, Irwin, Newton-John, & Slater, 2019; Cohen, Newton-John, & Slater, 2020; Coyne et al., 2020; Cwynar-Horta, 2016; Davies, Turner, & Udell, 2020; Rodgers, Meyer, & McCaig, 2020; Sastre, 2014; Cohen et al., 2020; Tiggemann, Anderberg, & Brown, 2020). BoPo encourages individuals to broaden their focus beyond the aesthetic qualities of the body to the body’s functional capabilities and strengths (i.e., what a body can do rather than what a body looks like) (Cohen, Irwin et al., 2019). These qualities of BoPo may reflect the conscious efforts of BoPo creators to counteract or mitigate negative appearance-related messaging; indeed, many advocates of BoPo are individuals in recovery from eating disorders (Cwynar-Horta, 2016). Whilst the origins of BoPo can be traced to the 1960s feminist fat-acceptance movement in the United States (Cwynar-Horta, 2016), it remains a relatively new concept in academic research. Nonetheless, BoPo is a phenomenon of clear importance to the general public. In 2019, Cohen, Fardouly et al. (2019) reported that a search of the hashtag #bodypositive on Instagram yielded ∼6.1 million posts. We conducted this same search on 14 May 2020 and yielded ∼12.6 million posts – a doubling in less than a year.

Quantitative and qualitative studies from the body image community suggest that viewing BoPo is beneficial to psychological wellbeing (Cohen, Fardouly et al., 2019, Cohen, Irwin et al., 2019; Coyne et al., 2020; Davies et al., 2020; Rodgers et al., 2020). Within this small literature, we have focused on experimental quantitative studies of BoPo and hereafter distinguish state and trait measures of body image and emotional wellbeing. Cohen, Fardouly et al. (2019) showed that exposing young women to BoPo images sourced from Instagram led to increases in state body satisfaction, state body appreciation, and state positive affect. In an impressive research program comprising three experiments, Coyne et al. (2020) showed that listening to BoPo song lyrics and watching BoPo music videos independently increased state body satisfaction among young women. Davies et al. (2020) showed that attaching BoPo captions to body-idealising images sourced from Instagram led to increases in state body satisfaction among young women, highlighting the importance of the social commentary attached to appearance-focused imagery and the importance of BoPo social commentary in particular. However, Tiggemann et al. (2020) conducted a similar study of BoPo captioning attached to body-idealising images and found that BoPo captions did not modify body satisfaction or body appreciation. We note that all these studies examined immediate changes in state variables (i.e., pre-post changes); longer-term changes were unexamined. Taken together, this small body of experimental research suggests that BoPo may be beneficial, albeit with several important caveats outlined by Tiggeman and colleagues (we highly recommend page 134 of their article in Body Image). Moreover, in the broader social media landscape, we interpret these experiments to suggest that BoPo has potential to act as a buffer against classes of image-based social media content harmful to body image; namely, thinspiration and fitspiration.

Thinspiration is a type of social media content that portrays and promotes excessively thin bodies (Griffiths, Castle et al., 2018; Wick & Harriger, 2018) and often appears as images overlaid with text encouraging weight loss (Lapinski, 2006). Themes of thinspiration include glorifying calorie restriction (Boepple & Thompson, 2016), advice on maintaining thinness (Ghaznavi & Taylor, 2015), and dysfunctional messages promoting disordered eating (Tiggemann, Churches, Mitchell, & Brown, 2018). The evidence that exposure to thinspiration deteriorates body image and emotional well-being is clear and convincing (e.g., Grabe, Ward, & Hyde, 2008; Hawkins, Richards, Granley, & Stein, 2004).

Fitspiration is distinguished from thinspiration in that it idealises thin, lean, and muscular bodies, rather than excessively thin bodies (Boepple & Thompson, 2016; Jong & Drummond, 2016). Fitspiration is notably gendered, emphasising conspicuously muscular body shapes for men, and thinner, more “toned” body shapes for women (Tiggemann & Zaccardo, 2015, 2018). Despite being newer, fitspiration has become considerably more popular and widespread than thinspiration (Tiggemann et al., 2018). Whilst research on the effects of fitspiration is more equivocal than thinspiration, the majority nonetheless suggests that exposure to fitspiration leads to greater body dissatisfaction, higher negative affect, and lower positive affect (Griffiths & Stefanovski, 2019; Holland & Tiggemann, 2017; Prichard, McLachlan, Lavis, & Tiggemann, 2018; Raggatt et al., 2018) We agree with recent comments that the popularity of fitspiration reflects, and may drive, changes in the ideal female body to be more toned and muscular (Bozsik, Whisenhunt, Hudson, Bennett, & Lundgren, 2018; Lipson, Stewart, & Griffiths, 2020). In our ecological momentary assessment study, we examined thinspiration and fitspiration only to provide important context to our BoPo findings. For ecological momentary assessment research focused specifically on thinspiration and fitspiration, we kindly direct readers to Griffiths and Stefanovski (2019).

Ecological momentary assessment is a self-report structured diary technique that allows researchers to investigate psychological phenomena in participants’ natural environments, owing to the ability to administrate data collection via participants’ devices, such as their mobile phone (Bolger & Laurenceau, 2013). Researchers who have published experimental studies of BoPo have pre-selected BoPo imagery, videos, or captions, and then exposed participants to these stimuli in controlled environments under controlled conditions – eminently sensible decisions that maximised the internal validity of these experiments (Cohen, Fardouly et al., 2019). A limitation of these experiments, however, is that they sacrifice ecological validity, insofar as the conditions of BoPo exposure in the laboratory are unlikely to match the conditions under which individuals naturally experience BoPo (e.g., in bed at night, on a smartphone, absent-mindedly scrolling through Instagram for ∼10 min… when unexpectedly, a BoPo image with an accompanying BoPo caption appears in their feed, posted by a friend). Ecological momentary assessment overcomes the inherent limitation of controlled experiments by allowing researchers to collect data in close proximity to participants’ natural interactions with BoPo, thereby providing an important and useful complement to existing experimental BoPo research (Shiffman, Stone, & Hufford, 2008; Thøgersen-Ntoumani et al., 2018).

The aims of our study were two-fold: First, to determine whether exposure to BoPo influences individuals’ subsequent body image and emotional wellbeing; and second, to identify those social media platforms where individuals most frequently encounter BoPo. Our confirmatory hypotheses were that exposure to BoPo would be associated with subsequently higher body satisfaction, lower negative affect, and higher positive affect. Our exploratory hypothesis was that BoPo would be most frequently encountered on image-centric social media platforms, and in particular, Instagram. We chose our three dependent variables (body satisfaction, negative affect, and positive affect) because body image and emotions are relevant, proximal targets for BoPo, and because published research on BoPo and body-idealising social media content have often examined these.

Section snippets

Initial sample and data exclusions

The initial sample consisted of 132 first-year undergraduate Psychology students at the University of Melbourne who were recruited through a research participation program in which students were recompensed with a small amount of course credit. Nineteen participants (14.4 %) were excluded from our main data analyses because they responded to less than 50 % of the 42 surveys sent to participants in the ecological momentary assessment protocol. Course credit was pro-rated for participants who did

Descriptive statistics for body satisfaction, negative affect, and positive affect

Table 1 provides descriptive statistics for our dependent variables. For body satisfaction and positive affect, participants’ mean scores were close to the scale mid-points, suggesting neutral body satisfaction and a medium level of positive affect, respectively. Participants’ mean negative affect was toward the lower end of the scale, suggesting generally low negative affect. Examination of our intra-class coefficients and of our within- and between-participant variances (see Table 1) suggests

Discussion

The aims of our study were two-fold: (i) to determine whether exposure to BoPo influences individuals’ subsequent body image and emotional wellbeing; and (ii) to identify those social media platforms where individuals most frequently encounter BoPo.

Funding sources and declaration of interest

Scott Griffiths receives research funding from the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (grant numbers: 1121538, 1179321, 1193738), the World Anti-Doping Agency, and the University of Melbourne.

The funders had no role in the design of the study, the collection or analysis of data, write-up of the manuscript, or the decision to submit the manuscript for publication.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Alicia Stevens: Conceptualization, Methodology, Data curation, Formal analysis, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing. Scott Griffiths: Conceptualization, Methodology, Resources, Formal analysis, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing, Visualization, Supervision.

Acknowledgements

We graciously thank Emma Austen, Peter Koval, Elise Kalokerinos, and Matthew Fuller-Tyszkiewicz for their help and guidance.

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