Testing a Brief Self-Compassion Intervention for Appearance-Based Social Media Use: Implications for Body Image and Mood
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Using social media applications such as Instagram can lead to increased body dissatisfaction and lower mood among young women. One intervention for combating the harmful effects of appearance-based social media may be through facilitating self-compassion, or the ability to treat oneself as a friend. This dissertation aimed to determine whether a brief writing-based self-compassion intervention (versus a neutral sorting task) could mitigate increases in body dissatisfaction and negative mood that are commonly observed among women after comparing themselves to thin-ideal images on Instagram. In two randomized controlled trials, 408 women (Study One: N = 178; Study Two: N = 230) between the ages of 18-55 years old were randomly assigned to complete either a brief self-compassion writing task or a simple sorting task (control). In Study One, participants were asked to scroll through an Instagram profile of pre-selected thin-ideal images and compare themselves to a young woman. Immediately after viewing the images and comparing themselves, participants completed their assigned task (i.e., self-compassion or sorting task). The results demonstrated that engaging in the self-compassion task led to increases in positive affect, more than the control task, but did not improve body dissatisfaction. In Study Two, the order of the intervention was reversed so that participants completed either the self-compassion or sorting task before scrolling through the thin-idealized images on Instagram. These results demonstrated that completing the self-compassion task before Instagram use prevented increases in body dissatisfaction, more than the control condition, but did not improve mood. Differential effects on mood were demonstrated for those on the extreme ends of trait self-compassion and physical appearance perfectionism. Appearance comparison tendency and thin ideal internalization were also examined as potential moderators with null findings. The results from these studies have the potential to increase women’s resilience against certain adverse effects of social media on body image.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".