Short-term effects of media exposure to the thin ideal in female inpatients with an eating disorder compared to female inpatients with a mood or anxiety disorder or women with no psychiatric disorder.

OBJECTIVE

Previous research demonstrated that the exposure to media portrayals of the thin body ideal negatively affects body satisfaction and mood of healthy women and thus represents a sociocultural risk factor for the development of eating disorders. However, at present, it is not known whether negative effects of the thin ideal are pronounced in eating-disordered patients.

METHOD: Female inpatients with a current diagnosis of anorexia nervosa (N = 36), bulimia nervosa (N = 32), or mood or anxiety disorder (N = 31), and women with no current psychiatric diagnosis were randomly assigned to exposure to magazine pictures depicting the thin female body ideal or landscape scenes in two experimental phases (leafing through a magazine followed by instructed imagination of a picture from the magazine). The groups were compared on measures of body satisfaction and mood that were collected before and after the two phases.

RESULTS

Leafing through a fashion magazine was not associated with negative effects on body satisfaction or mood in all groups. Imagining the thin ideal resulted in a decrease in body satisfaction and a decrease in positive mood. We found no diagnosis-specific effects indicating no stronger negative impact of the thin ideal on eating-disorder patients.

DISCUSSION: Given the lacking differences between eating-disordered patients and controls, these findings underline the importance of future research to enhance our understanding of what happens when patients are exposed to external or internal stimuli of media images of the thin ideal. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (Int J Eat Disord 2016; 49:708-715).