The Effect of Fitspiration and Thinspiration Images on Body Image

Body image-related social media content often promote unrealistic beauty ideals and unhealthy behaviors (Tiggemann & Zaccardo, 2015). Common online communities that promote these ideals have been termed fitspiration and thinspiration, both of which have been found to increase body image dissatisfaction following exposure compared to neutral non-body related social media exposure (Tiggeman & Zaccardo, 2015; Boepple & Thompson, 2016). However, research has yet to examine whether viewing fitspiration is as harmful as thinspiration by directly comparing the two. The goal of this research is to determine whether fitspiration or thinspiration exposure result in a greater increase in body image dissatisfaction. A total of 100 female Union College undergraduate students were randomly assigned to view either fitspiration related content or thinspiration related content and completed measures of (1) social networking use, (2) mood and body image dissatisfaction, (3) state self esteem, (4) level of inspiration, (5) state appearance comparison, and (6) trait appearance comparison. Initial findings show that there is a clinically significant increase in body image dissatisfaction after exposure to fitspiration content, while there is no change in body image dissatisfaction after exposure to thinspiration content.