The Media and Female Body Image

There's a paper by Grabe, Ward, and Hyde in this month's issue of Psychological Bulletin that presents a meta-analysis of 77 studies (correlational and experimental) on the relationship between the media's presentation of (overly) thin women and women's body image issues (from the shrink rap). The studies used a host of measures of body image, including measures of things like perceived body shape, anoretic cognition, body dissatisfaction, thin-ideal internalization, restrained eating, "bulimic symptomatology," appearance self-esteem, etc. For the relationship between media presentations of thin women and these various constructs, the average effect sizes ranged from -.28 to -.39, indicating small to moderate relationships.

If you have a subscription, you can read the paper here. Unfortunately, I can't find a free version of the paper anywhere, but if you really want to read it (remember, meta-analyses are boring as hell), send me an email.