Journal Entry 4

The article I read for journal entry three is titled, An Intervention for the “Negative Influence of Media on Body Esteem, written by Cheryl J. Hass, Laura A. Pawlow, Jon Pettibone, and Dan J. Segrist. The paper was about how knowing about proper body image, or psych-education, before being exposed to societies ideals can aid women. Researchers showed a group of women videos talking about the different aspects of body image. The first video had to deal with the fact that obtaining the body that media projects to society is not genetically possible. The second video talked of artificial beauty and how the flawless body that is seen in media is all touched up and not real. The other two videos had the same effect as the first two. After the videos were shown the subjects were exposed to media that depicted the perfect body as being skinny and thin. The subjects took test after being exposed and the test showed that the media did not affect these women.

This article goes hand in hand with the article I previously read. My previous article talked of how people with a high self-esteem were not affected by the media’s idea of the perfect body.  This coincides with the idea of he second article. The women who had not been affected could have had previous talks about the media’s idea of a perfect body this would influences their state of mind while watching the videos of the media’s perfect women. Whatever the women watched would be parallel to the psych- education that the women in my second article received.

Reading this article makes changes my idea of the media’s effect on one’s body image. I think now that if someone is introduced to a healthy idea of body image early on in his or her life then the media would not bother one so much and they would not try so hard to identify with it.  Thus, relating back to the idea of my first article that it is not the media’s fault for the misconception of body image. That yes it is wrong, but it is also the responsibility of the people watching to educate their children. So, they to can know they the difference between right and wrong. Although I feel like the American people should no be subjected to such things. I think that if a media outlet is aware that something is not right or is wrong and might negatively affect its viewers they should take matters into their own hands and fix it.

I plan to go deeper in to my topic that way the subject matter is not so broad. I know that the media negatively affects people’s body image, but I don’t know why or where this idea came from. I also might want to look at the effects of body image on African American Women, but I am not sure just yet.