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Project

The effects of exposure to sexualizing media on adolescents sexual maturation.

The postdoctoral project aims to conduct five studies to enhance scholarly insights in how media affect the well-being of adolescents and emerging adults. A first longitudinal study aims to bridge knowledge on media effects, sexuality, objectification and developmental theory by exploring the moderating role of sensation seeking in relationships between media, self-objectification and sexual behavior. A second longitudinal study responds to a call to investigate how media affect adolescents sexuality and tests whether gender stereotypical norms on sexual activities mediate the relationship between media use and sexual behavior. A third longitudinal study builds on the work of cultural differences in media responses to explore how values and lifestyles interact with content of dominantly U.S.-made audiovisual fiction in affecting the sexual behavior of adolescents in both countries. A fourth study aims to further explore how different sexualization experiences relate to self-objectification by setting up a between-subjects experiment among late adolescents to compare the impact of exposure to different types of media content with a control condition and with the manipulation that traditionally has been used in person-induced self-objectification research. A fifth study examines the assumption that adolescents, for various development-related reasons, are more vulnerable to sexual media effects than older age groups by organizing a between-subjects experiment to compare the impact of different types of media stimuli among adolescents and emerging adults.
Date:1 Oct 2013 →  30 Sep 2014
Keywords:Media effects, Sexuality, Objectification and developmental theory
Disciplines:Education, culture and society