A small group of researchers from the U.K. has found that exposing people to just 15 minutes of viewing pictures of women can influence their perception of the ideal female body type. In their paper uploaded to the bioRxiv preprint server, Jean-Luc Jucker, Tracey Thornborrow, Lynda Boothroyd and Martin Tovee describe research on people unexposed to modern media and their suggestibility regarding how they believe a woman should look.
To learn more about the impact of people looking at pictures of women with thin bodies, the researchers traveled to the Mosquito Coast in Nicaragua—there, people living in villages do not have electricity, and therefore have not been exposed on a continuing basis to images of women with thin bodies.
The researchers asked 80 individuals of various ages and both genders to sit alone at a computer and use software that allowed them to build a woman based on what they believed the ideal female form to be. Each was then shown multiple pictures of women from a clothing catalogue for approximately 15 minutes—some saw pictures from a “normal” catalogue that used typically thin models and some from a plus-size catalogue. Then, each participant was once again asked to create the perfect female form on the computer.
Read more of the original article from MedicalXpress
