Processing Body Image on Social Media: Gender Differences in Adolescent Boys’ and Girls’ Agency and Active Coping.
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Although scholars continue to debate the influence of social media on body image, increased social media use, especially engaging in appearance-related behaviors may be a potential risk factor for body dissatisfaction in adolescents. Little research has investigated how adolescents process appearance-related content and the potential strategies they use to protect body image perceptions on social media. To investigate coping strategies used by adolescents, four qualitative focus groups were conducted with 29 adolescents (23 girls) aged 15–16 years (M = 15.31, SD = 0.47) in mixed-gender Irish secondary schools. Thematic analysis revealed that adolescents employed many different behavioral strategies such as avoiding negative content and selecting positive content. Cognitive processing strategies such as critically evaluating body-related content, psychologically distancing from and positively reframing challenging content were also used, although less frequently. Boys appeared to exhibit greater positive agency over their bodies and social media use and tended to use more active coping styles than girls. Efforts to promote body image on social media such as body positive pages and exposing artificial social media content were considered limited in their effectiveness.
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Three studies indicated low social media literacy amongst participants, including difficulty switching off from damaging posts and an inability to recognise edited versus unedited posts.
“Three studies indicated low social media literacy amongst participants, including difficulty switching off from damaging posts and an inability to recognise edited versus unedited posts [63, 73, 82].”
From The social media diet: A scoping review to investigate the association between social media, body image and eating disorders amongst young people (2023) · cites this paper as [73]
In Results, Theme 1 (page unavailable), some participants said damaging body-related images kept appearing despite efforts to avoid them. The Discussion (page unavailable) says boys were less aware of image editing, but it does not establish an inability to distinguish edited from unedited posts; it also describes high social media literacy among some participants. The broad characterization of participants as having low social media literacy is therefore overstated. (LLM, conf=0.88)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measuredThrough social media, someone else can always look better, skinnier, or prettier.
“Through the lens of social media, someone else can always look better, skinnier, or prettier [73].”
From The social media diet: A scoping review to investigate the association between social media, body image and eating disorders amongst young people (2023) · cites this paper as [73]
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- Authors
- Mahon, C., & Hevey, D.
- Affiliations
- Trinity College Dublin (IE)
- Corresponding author
- Mahon, Ciara
- Venue
- Frontiers in Psychology
- Publisher
- Frontiers Media SA
- Published
- 2021-05-21
- Volume
- 12
- Pages
- 626763-626763
- ISSN
- 1664-1078 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC8175666
- OpenAlex
- W3162214085
- Cited by
- 119
- References
- 65
- Citations by year
- 2026: 15 · 2025: 30 · 2024: 29 · 2023: 27 · 2022: 16 · 2021: 2
- FWCI
- 12.62
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Frontiers in Psychology (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Lenus, The Irish Health Repository (Dr Steevens Hospital Library) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- Trinity College Dublin
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Clinical Psychology › Eating Disorders and Behaviors
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Clinical Psychology › Body Image and Dysmorphia Studies
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Impact of Technology on Adolescents
- Keywords
- body image, social media, adolescents, gender differences, active coping, body dissatisfaction, coping strategies, body agency, high school students
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