The harmful effects of idealized Instagram content: Self-affirmation interventions do not mitigate decreased body...

Women who use highly visual social media platforms (e.g., Instagram) frequently experience body dissatisfaction and negative affect, but evidence of effective interventions is limited. Self-affirmation interventions, which reinforce a positive self-image prior to a threat, provide a promising but understudied solution to body image disturbance following social media use. In this experiment, 250 college-aged women from the U.S. were randomly assigned to complete one of three writing tasks: a general affirmation, a body positive affirmation, or a control task. Participants then viewed ten Instagram posts with either idealized images of influencers or nature images and reported on their body satisfaction and affect (scored as negative, positive, and combined). Results indicated that, as predicted, women who saw idealized influencers in the absence of an intervention expressed lower positive affect and lower body satisfaction after seeing the images. Contrary to predictions, participants in both intervention conditions also expressed less positive affect and lower body satisfaction after seeing the images, and the body positive affirmation may have even been harmful. We discuss the implications of our findings, describing how nuances in operationalization of affect-related variables may affect interpretation of results.