Social Media and Body Image: Modulating Effects of Social Identities and User Characteristics

Social media use and exposure, in particular to highly visual and appearance-focused content, has shown a relationship with poorer body image with small to moderate effect sizes. The aim here was to provide an overview of the theoretical and empirical evidence of the relationships between social media use and body image may vary across individuals. Although evidence exists to support variations in these relationships across different groups, to date, data are scarce and a number of theoretically important groups have largely been overlooked. The available evidence suggests that age may be an important moderating factor of vulnerability to exposure to highly-visual social media content, with younger adolescents most likely to experience negative outcomes. In addition, women and other groups for whom appearance is strongly tied to attractiveness and self-worth may be at heightened risk. Moving forward further research should aim to focus on understanding the relationships between social media use and body image concerns among underrepresented groups, and to expand the focus of to include different aspects of social media use and more sophisticated methodological approaches.

Publication year:2022

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