Social Media and Adolescent Girls’ Body Image

[Dr. Choukas-Bradley] Awareness is part of the answer, but unfortunately not the whole solution. We have decades of research on mass media influences, on adult women’s body image, and we know that even when adult women with fully developed brains and decades of experience looking at media images are fully, cognitively aware that an image has been Photoshopped and is not real, exposure to those mass media images still leads immediately to decreases in body image. So when you think about social media and how it can be really hard to tell when something is real or fake because everyday people, adolescent girls and people of all genders and ages have access to apps that can allow them to dramatically change their bodies, but in ways that are not immediately detectable, according to research that’s been done in the Netherlands. And when you think about the adolescent developmental period and how susceptible adolescents are to peer influences and how their brains aren’t finished developing, and we are trying to understand how we can use evidence-based principles from clinical psychology, as well as principles from educational psychology to bring in different aspects of behavioral change and values-alignment, approaches beyond just raising awareness, although that is one really important piece.