The Way You Perceive Your Body Matters: Interventions Aimed to Reduce Body Dissatisfaction

Aims: To determine if brief interventions of cognitive dissonance, media literacy, and a mindful body scan can reduce body dissatisfaction among female undergraduate students and whether mindfulness, emotion regulation, positive and negative affect, and media literacy levels have an impact on body appreciation.

Study Design: The present study used an experimental design and included three intervention groups and an active control group.

Place and Duration of Study: Centre for Psychological Innovation at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta, Canada from January 17th to March 6th, 2020.

Methodology: 78 female participants between the ages of 17 to 49 years with a mean age of 21 years (SD = 5.16). All participants underwent a body dissatisfaction induction procedure and completed self-report questionnaires on body satisfaction (using the Body Appreciation Scale), mindfulness (using the Five Facet Mindfulness Scale), emotion regulation (using the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation), positive and negative affect (using the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule), and media literacy (using the Critically Thinking About Media Messages, Media Attitudes Questionnaire, and the Sociocultural Attitudes Towards Appearance Questionnaire).

Results: Three separate multiple linear regression tests revealed that there were differences in the variables predicting body appreciation scores at Time1, F(7, 70) = 12.09, p < .001, Time 2, F(7, 70) = 14.74, p< .001, and Time3, F(7, 70) = 15.07, p < .001. A one-way ANOVA revealed that body appreciation scores increased for all four conditions after completion of the intervention, F(1, 76) = .069, p = .793 but not after the body dissatisfaction induction procedure or before the intervention.

Conclusion: These findings confirm that negative affect and low levels of media literacy contribute to feelings of body dissatisfaction and that brief periods of steering the mind away from the body lead to increases in body appreciation.