United States: Recent expert research indicates unhealthful body perception development occurs at the beginning of childhood.
Research published in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology shows that body assessments develop in children starting from age seven while linking this process to probable future eating disorder development.
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As per the lead researcher, Lynda Boothroyd, a professor of psychology at Durham University in the UK, “It has been clear for many years that we need to be wary about visual media which present only a narrow range of bodies because this affects adults’ body perceptions,” US News reported.
According to her, “Now we know that’s true for children, too,” and “Even very neutral images can adjust their ideas about what is heavy or thin if they see enough of the same kind of body.”
The Mental Health Foundation indicates that unrealistic or “perfect” body images drive people to evaluate themselves negatively, which motivates them to chase after ideal body types.
Developing eating and mood disorders becomes possible due to this pattern.
The researchers conducted experiments which included children from age 7 to 15 in addition to adult participants for this new investigation.
Three hundred participants made up the total number of study participants.
What more are the experts stating?
Research participants evaluated a series of photos that displayed people of different BMIs before determining their weight perception.
Results demonstrate that every age group modified their body weight judgment after reviewing medical obesity or overweight pictures.
Both children and adults modified their weight evaluation downward when researchers presented them with high-BMI image examples.
Research suggests that people develop shifting perceptions about body weight starting at age seven, according to researcher claims.
“Researchers often assume that children’s body perceptions and their ideas about body image work the same way as adults,” Boothroyd added.
“We’ve shown that that’s true, down to seven years, for basic perceptual impacts on body weight perception,” the expert continued.
People in Western white communities face a greater need to stay thin as a result of media body-type portrayals, according to previous research, which also shows Black Nigerian women and Chinese women across every age group do not experience similar pressure, researchers noted.
“We have demonstrated that perceptions of body weight are subject to adaptation aftereffects that are adult-like from 7 years of age onward,” researchers noted
“Thus, these results have implications for our understanding of body size (mis)perception in health and well-being contexts as well as for our broader understanding of the development of body perception,” they described.