Body Image Research Paper

“Healthy body image is not something you are going to learn from fashion magazines”~ Erin Heatherton. What is body image? It is how an individual perceives themselves and how others perceive them.There is a positive body image and there is a negative body image. Media promotes values and images that challenge our self perception/identity, and how we view the world. In response to this we buy into their value systems and worldviews that differ from our own beliefs. Media portrays images of women that are not realistic as they should be. There are gender stereotypes and objectifications of the bodies of females, this affects the self-esteem and self perception of women (Kilbourn, Still Killing Me Softly). Sexualized images of women are being
Albert Bandura is a psychologist who has studied the learning behaviour of individuals. He believed that people learn through observation and acting upon it. A study done by Fister and Smith (2004) on the effect of media images to women and its relationship to eating disorders and subsequent thinness. “Fister and Smith found that the association between initial risk for disordered eating and subsequent thinness expectancy endorsement was much smaller in an average-size model image-viewing group than in a controlled or thin model image-viewing group.” This showed that girls who were exposed to thin model images were more affected than those exposed to the average size of women. In an interview held with an up in coming model named {Britney} Kelleher, she discusses her problems with the fight to becoming overcome by an eating disorder. “ Of course. It [media] makes you think you’re not good enough. Like if you don’t starve yourself, you are never going to fit in; be able to be a model. You’re not the ideal size or look.” This shows that if media can get you to think like they want you to they can get you to do what they
Social marketing is based on one premises. Since marketing has been largely successful in making people chose to buy some products as opposed to competing products, then the same techniques should be effective in encouraging people to adopt certain behaviours that would lead to better physical and mental health, and eventually a wide-scale social change. Social marketing borrowed concepts from psychology, sociology, communication, and preventive medicine. Social marketing theory is an interdisciplinary venture that requires collaborative research between scholars in several traditional disciplines

In conclusion people may internalize the information the media shows them.which then becomes part of their reality. It is within this reality that the people attempt to gain an understanding of how we interpret the world in which we live. In 1994 George Gerbner researched the influence of television has on society. He saw that television was a means of transmitting culture across the country. Albert Bandura had a theory about how people can learn through observation and how media impacts them and how this influences them to buy goods that will help them reach the goal of becoming the ideal they