The Concept Of Body Image

The concept of body image is one of the greatest underlying themes in personal satisfaction and dissatisfaction. Body image as described by Nio, is “a person’s unique perception of his/her body. It’s how we perceive ourselves, how we think, we appear to others, how we feel about our look from ‘our own internal view’” (3). Humans are constantly making themselves aware of the image their body portrays. The problem has become that instead of being comfortable with the body they are given, there seems to always be a yearning for what others have. A number of these problems can be attributed to the ever-growing media industry, and in this century, even more so focusing on social media that has a purpose of strengthening external validity. The United

Self- Efficacy as defined in "Teens’ Social Media Use and Collective Action”, is one’s ability to succeed in specific situations or accomplish a task. Self-Efficacy plays a role in how one approaches goals, tasks, and challenges (ix). Collective self-esteem, is “an individual’s self-concept derived from his/her ‘knowledge of membership’ in a social group together with the value and emotional significance attached to that membership” (Seo et al. 885). Self-Esteem is an important psychological human need. These are internal factors that affect how people view their external factors, and can affect how people modify their personal behaviors (Nio,

In Nio’s dissertation, she states, “today, we are living in an era and culture that place much emphasis on the physical attractiveness of both genders” (3). Early research on body image started around the 1930s (Nio, 18). Originally, the research on body images focused on women and men feeling fat, dieting, weighting themselves, and eating disorders (Reed,1). In a more recent research study, done by Fallon and Rosen, they dived body images into four categories; current, ideal, attractive, and other attractive. Current is the way subjects perceive their bodies now, whereas ideal is the image they would prefer to have. Attractive is an image that subjects believe is the most attractive to the opposite sex, conversely other attractive is the body image that subjects prefer in the opposite sex. Through this research it is concluded that women have a distorted view on the body images that mean find attractive (Reed, 4). This is because “researchers have found that images of women in the media have been getting thinner over the past four decades” (Nio, 5). This is what Nio calls the Thin-Ideal Syndrome caused by an unconscientious internalized sociocultural of the ideal standard of beauty. This creates the idea of beauty being almost synonymous with being thin