As Facebook's popularity continues to grow, more teens than ever have a presence on the social media site, and many use it as a platform to "measure their appearance and feelings of self-esteem based on the response level they get from posting photos," Medical Daily reports, though researchers warn that these patterns could have terrible consequences, especially for adolescent girls.
The Center for Eating Disorders commissioned a new public survey of Facebook users between the ages of 16-40, asking them a series of questions to determine how the site has impacted their body image and their overall feelings about their weight and appearance. More than half of those surveyed reported that social networking made them more self-conscious about their bodies and weight, and nearly half said that they have spent time wishing they were the same weight or had the same body type as a friend while browsing through photos.
While the phenomenon of online physical appearance comparisons is far from new as social media sites have been around for years, a recent study published in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking strongly suggests the potentially harmful physical and mental health impacts heavy Facebook photosharing and self-exposure may have on teens, especially for girls who may be more prone to self-objectification.
"Given the connection between eating disorders and body image distortion and dissatisfaction, it is important to identify contributing factors in this particularly vulnerable group," Brenda K. Wiederhold, Ph.D., M.B.A., BCIA, Editor-in-Chief of Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, from the Interactive Media Institute, San Diego, said in a press release. "By identifying these factors, we can move towards designing more effective prevention programs."
A team of researchers who led the study recruited 103 female students from New York State between the ages of 12 and 18 in hopes of pinpointing which features of Facebook are most associated with body image disturbances. Eighty-five percent of the girls were, notably, predominately white. The girls were asked to complete 20-30 minute surveys that measured their total Facebook use, specific feature use, "weight dissatisfaction, drive for thinness, thin ideal internalization, appearance comparison, and self-objectification," according to Medical Daily.
Adolescent girls who spent a great deal of time using the site's photo functions were, as the researchers predicted, more likely to self-objectify and compare their physical appearances to other girls their age, and far more likely to value the number of "likes" they received on their photos as opposed to their own thoughts about themselves and their bodies. General Facebook use did not seem to affect body image, however.
The researchers wrote that too much time spent using Facebook photo functions and self-comparing bodies online may increase a girl's chance of suffering from an eating disorder, similar to the way beauty magazines, ads and sexually objectifying film and television affect the teenage mind.
