16:30 - 18:00
Mon-A7-Talk III-
Mon-Talk III-
Room: A7
Chair/s:
Kamil Fulawka
Openness to cosmetic surgery among Hungarian university women: Scrambled Sentence Task as priming
Mon-A7-Talk III-06
Presented by: Fanni Őry
Fanni Őry, Norbert Meskó
University of Pécs, Institute of Psychology
As physical attractiveness plays an important role in human mating psychology, women try to look as attractive as possible. Cosmetic surgery can be a tool to enhance attractiveness. As women are under considerable socio-cultural pressure to achieve the ideal of slimness, cosmetic surgery is becoming increasingly popular. These social expectations are easily internalised by women, who begin to see their own bodies as aesthetic objects, which also increases the popularity of cosmetic surgeries. The present study investigates the openness to cosmetic surgery among Hungarian university women in a priming situation. 102 women (Mage=20.7, SDage=2.13) participated in the personal data collection. They were randomly divided into 3 groups and solved a 15-sentence version of the Scrambled Sentence Task (e.g., ‘A woman must be sexy’). The priming sentences were either body-objectifying or body-empowering or unrelated to physical appearance. The participants also filled a questionnaire package containing the Acceptance of Cosmetic Surgery Scale (ACSS), Body Appreciation Scale (BAS), Objectified Body Consciousness Scale (OBCS), and Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSE). Our results showed that those participants who worked with the body-objectifying sentences were more open to cosmetic surgery, had more negative body image and self-esteem than the two other groups. However, the Scrambled Sentence Task wasn’t effective enough to increase self-objectification, as no significant difference was found for objectified body consciousness. This experiment reflects well the messages from the social space related to physical appearance, but to investigate the complex effect of media, we need to complement the priming situation with visual and sound effects.
Keywords: cosmetic surgery, objectified body consciousness, body image, self-esteem, priming