In addressing gender differences between the prevalence of eating disorders, it has been shown that magazines aimed at a female audience (Cosmopolitan, Redbook, etc.) contain about ten times as many articles and advertisements endorsing weight loss than do magazines read by a male audience (Anderson &DiDomenico, 1992). The authors also take note of the fact that this probability is almost identical to the ratio of reported cases of eating disorders between males and females. .
In a study by Pinhas, Toner, Ali, and Garfinkel (1998), women reported feelings of depression, dissatisfaction and an overall sense of lowered self-esteem after having viewed pictures of female fashion models. The experiment's main purpose was to inspect the relationship between exposure to the visual representation of ideal "female beauty- in Western culture and feelings of body dissatisfaction and depressed mood. One hundred and eighteen female college students were asked to complete the Eating Disorder Inventory (EDI), the Profile of Mood States (POMS), and the Body Parts Satisfaction Scale (BPSS), in order to measure the students' feelings previous to being exposed to multiple images of fashion models. One week later, half of the women where shown a series of pictures of the models taken from popular magazines, while the control half was shown pictures without any people present in them (i.e. scenic views, etc.). They were then asked to complete the POMS and BPSS once again. The result of this experiment showed that members of the experimental group reported higher feelings of anger, hostility, and depression after viewing the images than did the control group. Also, the degree of anger to which a person responded in the experimental group was positively correlated to their scores on the EDI. This experiment is beneficial in showing that images in media can indeed cause feelings of lowered self-esteem in women.
