Does Exposure to Thin Ideal Bodies Increase Self-Disgust?

Objectives: This study investigates whether exposure to thin-ideal body images, commonly encountered on social networking sites (SNSs), leads to increased body dissatisfaction, body-related anxiety, and self-disgust among young women. While previous research has established a link between SNS use and body dissatisfaction, the role of self-disgust in this context remains underexplored. Methods: A total of 59 healthy young women ( Results: Participants showed a significant decrease in body satisfaction ( Conclusions: Consistent with sociocultural/objectification literature, thin-ideal exposure elicited immediate increases in dissatisfaction and anxiety and extended prior work by documenting state self-disgust as a plausible affective response. These findings underscore the need for media literacy interventions and further exploration of emotional mechanisms in body image disturbance. Generalizability is limited by the all-female and the single-session pre-post design without an active control. Effects should be interpreted as upper-bound estimates of immediate reactivity.