The Protective Role of Autonomous Motivation Against the Effects of the “Muscular Ideal” on Men’s Self-Objectification, Appearance Schema Activation, and Cognitive Performance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The objective of this 3-study research program was to identify and understand whether self-objectification (i.e., mediator) and motivation orientation (i.e., autonomous versus controlled; moderators) influenced men’s cognitive functioning following exposure to advertisements portraying the male muscular ideal. Overall, we aimed to (a) test an original moderated mediation model to further understand the complexities of men’s body image outcomes and (b) assess the moderating roles of autonomous and controlled motivation to understand its potential relationship with men’s body image. Using objectification theory and self-determination theory as frameworks to situate our models, we explored whether the muscular ideal, compared to the neutral video group, negatively affected men’s cognitive functioning using 3 different cognitive tasks intended to measure appearance schema activation (Study 1), visual-spatial processing (Study 2), and processing proficiency (Study 3). Results showed that the muscular ideal induced a state of self-objectification among men, which in turn, mediated viewer’s levels of appearance schema activation. Findings also revealed that autonomous motivation moderated the effects. High levels of autonomous motivation played a protective role on viewer’s cognitive performance on all three mental tasks, whereas controlled motivation did not predict any relationships. Implications and future directions are discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".