Television's Effect on Self Image

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Recommended: Media influence on beauty

New mirrors are in the market and many homes have been remodeled with these mirrors. These new mirror are like snow whites mirror, they tell you who the most beautiful one of all is. A little girl is looking at her new mirror that tells her she has to wear makeup and look a certain way in order to be beautiful. This new mirror is the TV and the voice that is telling her is the media. The media portrays the beauty of women a certain way that is distorting beauty.

The media distorts image so much that women start to see an unrealistic beauty and think that all women should actually look that way. An experiment done by Mahler Beckerley and Vogel (2010) demonstrate that women’s attitudes about certain looks reflect on how they view the models. There were two groups of women and some saw photos of models that were tanned and the other saw models that were not tanned. The participants then were told to describe their attitude about tanning. The group of women that viewed models that had a tan had a more positive attitude toward tans and the group of women that viewed models with out a tan had a negative attitude towards tanning. This research demonstrates that the media has a big influence in the decision women make on their appearance.

So what is beauty? Is beauty the perfect supermodel on a magazine? Is it the stunning actress on television? Do you have to be thin and tall? According to Dictionary.com Unabridged, beauty is “the quality present in a thing or person that gives intense pleasure or deep satisfaction to the mind, whether arising from sensory manifestations (as shape, color, sound, etc.), a meaningful design or pattern, or something else (as a personality in which high spiritual qualities are manifest)”. However, the m...

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...:10.1080/14680770903068266

Mahler, H. M., Beckerley, S. E., & Vogel, M. T. (2010). Effects of Media Images on Attitudes Toward Tanning. Basic & Applied Social Psychology, 32(2), 118-127.

Slater, A., Tiggemann, M., Firth, B., & Hawkins, K. (2012). Reality Check: An Experimental Investigation of the Addition of Warning Labels to Fashion Magazine Images on Women's Mood and Body Dissatisfaction. Journal Of Social & Clinical Psychology, 31(2), 105-122.

Solomon, M. R., Ashmore, R. D., & Basil G., E. (1994). Beauty before the Eyes of Beholders: The Cultural Encoding of Beauty Types in Magazine Advertising and Music Television. Journal Of Advertising, 23(2), 49-64.

Bates, C. (2012, January 05). Mail online. Retrieved from http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2082500/A-quarter-children-10-diet-think-overweight-face-bullying-taunts-shocking-survey-finds.html

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