**3. The media and perceived appearance norms**

as compared to a control condition. Interestingly, they also found that giving women fantasy instructions to imagine themselves in the place of a thin model led to improved mood as compared to control. In sum, the way that idealized images are cognitively processed is a key determinant in terms of the impact those images have on an individual's self‐perceptions of attractiveness or beauty. But little is yet known about why some people are more at risk for

Trait, dietary restraint has been found to moderate individuals' responses to idealized body images found in the media. Mills et al. [8] found that restrained eaters (i.e. chronic dieters) are differentially impacted by exposure to thin ideal media as compared to unrestrained eaters. Restrained eaters frequently attempt to lose weight by restricting what they eat. We con‐ cluded that restrained eaters may be susceptible to a 'thin fantasy' when viewing ideal body images. Specifically, restrained eaters, but not unrestrained eaters, rated both their ideal and current body as thinner and felt more attractive as a result of viewing ideal body images in magazine advertisements. This effect was further moderated by thinness attainability beliefs. Specifically, the immediate enhancement of women's feelings of attractiveness fol‐ lowing exposure to the thin ideal was stronger when dieters were led to believe that they could lose weight through dieting, as compared to when they were told that losing weight is extremely difficult. In other words, under certain conditions, thin ideal media images can actually make women feel better about their appearance. These effects are presumed to be short‐lived, although no research to date has examined how long self‐enhancement lasts after

Further evidence that the context of the idealized images is important in terms of their psychological impact comes from a recent study by Veldhuis et al. [9]. The authors found that when self‐improvement messages accompanied images of idealized bodies, exposure increased body satisfaction in a sample of undergraduate men and women, as compared to self‐evaluation messages or control. Knobloch‐Westerwick [10] also found that women, who made self‐improvement (versus self‐evaluation) social comparisons in response to thin‐ideal images, had improved body satisfaction as opposed to decreased body satisfaction. In other words, the messages that accompany idealized body images commonly found in the media make a difference in terms of how people feel about their bodies after looking at them.

Lastly, the psychological construct of body appreciation, or the extent to which one allows negative body‐related information to be rejected and positive information to be accepted, is an individual difference variable that has been found to be protective against some of the negative psychological impacts that stem from exposure to idealized media images. Andrew et al. [11] found that, in a sample of university women, participants with low body appreciation experi‐ enced increased body dissatisfaction after exposure to thin‐ideal advertisements whereas indi‐ viduals with high body appreciation did not. This lends support to the idea that women, who have a positive bias in their perceptions of their body, are less likely to experience a negative

Body dissatisfaction is a major predictor of the development of clinically disordered eating. While it oversimplifies the psychopathology of eating disorders to suggest that exposure to thin ideal images causes eating disorders, thin ideal images do have significant health

shift in body image in response to exposure to thin ideal media images.

comparing themselves to idealized images.

148 Perception of Beauty

exposure to thin ideal images.

It could be that the mass media affect their audience not only by reinforcing beauty ideals ('thin is beautiful') or by eliciting immediate changes in terms of how people perceive and evaluate their own appearance, but also by influencing perceived norms. Experimental find‐ ings demonstrate that perceptions of what is considered to be 'average', influence how indi‐ viduals feel about their own bodies. In other words, one of the reasons that media‐portrayed thin ideal images can be harmful is because they skew what people think of as being 'normal' or typical in a given population. There is no research to date directly testing the question of whether media images change people's perceptions of what is considered average or typical. However, there is indirect evidence to support this idea. Studies show that women generally want their bodies to appear a certain way depending on (1) what they think other people find attractive and (2) what they think the average person looks like.

In a series of experimental studies, Bair et al. [15] examined the influence of normative body ideals (i.e. the body type purported to be preferred by their peers) on body image. University students were told that their peers preferred the look of either relatively thinner or relatively heavier body types. In other words, we varied what participants believed to be 'beautiful' to other people. The gender of the peers whose preferences were being reported was also manipulated. Participants then reported the body size they most wanted to look like, from a range of hand‐drawn silhouettes. Women selected a thinner personal ideal body size in the thin norm condition than in the heavy norm condition. This was true whether they were told what either men or other women found most attractive.

In a related study by Mills et al. [16], we examined the effect of purported body norms on ideal and current body size perception. In study one, female participants were given bogus information about the average body size of women of the same age as participants. Current and ideal body size perceptions were then measured. Women reported a thinner ideal body size in the thinner norm condition than in the heavier norm condition, sup‐ porting the idea that ideal body size is malleable. Women had shifted their ideal body size so that it was a bit thinner than what they believed the average woman's body looked like. We interpreted these findings to mean that women may set their ideal as thinner than average so that they can be seen (or see themselves) as special. Study two replicated these results, but in a sample of young men. In this case, body norms were manipulated through purported averages in terms of muscularity rather than thinness. Men had a more muscular ideal body size in the more muscular norm condition than in the less muscular norm condition.
