Feeling Bad About Feel-Good Ads: The Emotional and Body-Image Ramifications of Body-Positive Media

In recent years beauty companies have produced advertising campaigns purporting to make women feel better about their bodies and reverse the damage of thin-ideal media (e.g., The Dove Campaign for Real Beauty). Despite being celebrated in the popular press for the effort, little is known about how effective these advertisements are at healing issues of poor body image. In addition, little work has been done to explore the relationship between discrete emotions and body image. The present study was an experiment aimed at capturing the different discrete emotions experienced in a body-positive advertisement compared to traditional beauty ad. Findings assert that participants reported experiencing positive (e.g., elevation and hope) and negative (e.g., guilt and pride) discrete emotions significantly more than their counterparts in the traditional beauty ad condition. Results also show no significant difference in postexposure thin-ideal internalization between the two conditions.