| Objectified body consciousness refers to a tendency that women adopt an observer's perspective to see themselves, concentrate only on body shape and appearance and treat their bodies as merely object to be looked at and evaluated. The objectified body consciousness could have serious consequences on women's mental health. Previous studies focus on the effect of offline objectification experience on women's objectified body consciousness. Yet, it is largely ignored that online objectification experience also has effect on objectified body consciousness. As the internet develops, an increasingly number of people communicates online. The proportion of Chinese online software users has reached approximately 91.1% by the end of January, 2017, indicating that online objectification experience has begin to play its role in women's objectified body consciousness. The present study aimed at exploring whether and how online objectification experiences affect objectified body consciousness among women. The following 3 studies was conducted:Study 1 investigated one of the most typical behaviors—selfie-and its effect. A double path model was proposed, that is, browsing selfies is positively associated with body surveillance and body shame through thin ideal internalization while posting selfie is positively associated with body surveillance and body shame through received sexual comments. A sample of 402 female WeChat users were recruited to participant in a questionnaire survey regarding selfie-related activities, thin-ideal internalization, received sexual comments, body surveillance and body shame. Result showed that the proposed model was supported.Study 2 confirmed the model that study 1 proposed by two situational experiments.Study 2a recruited 155 WeChat users and randomly allocated to two groups. The task of experiment group was to browse one female friend's selfie and the task of control group was to browse one female friend's scenery picture. Then all the participants completed the state objectified body consciousness questionnaire and wrote down their next week's plan.Result showed that browsing peer's selfie was more positively related to thin-ideal internalization, objectified body consciousness and body management tendency than browsing peer's scenery picture. Study 2b recruited 100 WeChat users and randomly allocated to two groups. The task of experiment group was to post one selfie in their profile and the task of control group was to post one scenery picture. 24 hours later, all the participants completed the state objectified body consciousness questionnaire and wrote down their next week's plan. The assistant calculated the number of "likes" and the number of sexual comments. Result showed that posting selfie was more likely to receive"like" and sexual comments than posting scenery picture and this was further positively related to body management tendency.Study 3 examined whether online objectification experience affect female college students' cognition. Online objectification experience questionnaire was used to measure 207 female college students' cognition. 18 females who scored high in the questionnaire and 13 females who scored low in the questionnaire were selected to participate in study3.The cue-target paradigm was used to explore the reaction time and ERP. The behavioral data showed that those who scored high in online objectification experience have higher reaction time (RT) to body shape pictures than those who scored low. There is no significant difference between the RT of the two groups in neural pictures. Moreover, the ERP data showed that those who scored low in online objectification experience has higher P300 than those who scored high, indicating that online objectification experience damages female's cognition.These findings indicated that online objectification experiences not only increase women's body surveillance but cause damages in women's cognition as well. |
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