Are Quest Students' Self-Esteems Effected by Magazine Covers?

For our final project in Intro to Psych with Megan Bulloch, we were given to opportunity to create our own psych experiment and try it out on the students. I was SUPER excited to start this project from the beginning because I had a great idea of how to integrate My Question into this project. I knew from when I began my journey to answer My Question that it was going to be a challenge to get the "mental health" aspect covered since nutritionist don't fully understand exactly how the nutrition and mental health are related. But since psychology is all about how humans think and perceive the world, I thought this would be an excellent opportunity to put this aspect to good use.

For my project, I wanted to test whether the attractiveness of the celebrities on magazines effected the self-esteems and moods of students. I was interested in this project because recently I have been learning a lot about how the media has advance to a stage that less than 5% of magazine covers are NOT photoshopped or digitally enhanced!!!!! How crazy is that?!?!

And, everywhere I go, I see magazine covers! We talked about subliminal advertising in class one day and how studies have shown that by seeing the same thing over and over again, the image can be instilled in your mind whether you consciously notice the image or not! To demonstrate it, we watched a video of a british illusionist named Derren Brown who secretly created an image in two advertisers' minds by driving them down streets with small hints. It's kind of hard to describe but if you would like to be amazed! Watch the video here.

Since the current increase in obesity in America, most of the magazines, both men and women's, advertise how to loose weight and get in shape. But it's not like they are saying " oh, here is how you can change your life and be healthier." No, it's more like " Loose 10 pounds in a weeks" and "Get strong abs in 6 days." It's almost as if they are telling the reader "YOU WILL NEVER BE GOOD ENOUGH!" And if subliminal advertising is true, than these headlines might be influencing how we in North America view our bodies and how happy we are with them (which might be one of the reasons why so many people suffer with eating disorders and/or do not follow a healthy eating cycle such as skipping meals or overeating).

This is why I wanted to do this project. I wanted to see if the this type of media was subconsciously effecting our self-esteems. Check out the link below to see what happened. :)

Magazines -