Brain activation upon ideal-body media exposure and peer feedback in late adolescent girls

Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci (2017) 17:712–723 DOI 10.3758/s13415-017-0507-y Brain activation upon ideal-body media exposure and peer feedback in late adolescent girls Mara van der Meulen 1,2 & Jolanda Veldhuis 3 & Barbara R. Braams 1,2 & Sabine Peters 1,2 & Elly A. Konijn 3 & Eveline A. Crone 1,2 Published online: 4 May 2017 # The Author(s) 2017. This article is an open access publication Abstract Media’s prevailing thin-body ideal plays a vital role in adolescent girls’ body image development, but the cooccurring impact of peer feedback is understudied. The present study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to test media imagery and peer feedback combinations on neural activity related to thin-body ideals. Twenty-four healthy female late adolescents rated precategorized body sizes of bikini models (too thin or normal), directly followed by ostensible peer feedback (too thin or normal). Consistent with prior studies on social feedback processing, results showed increased brain activity in the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC)/anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and bilateral insula in incongruent situations: when participants rated media models’ body size as normal while peer feedback indicated the models as too thin (or vice versa). This effect was stronger for girls with lower self-esteem. A subsequent behavioral study (N = 34 female late adolescents, separate sample) demonstrated that participants changed behavior in the direction of the peer feedback: precategorized normal sized models were rated as too thin more often after receiving too thin peer feedback. This suggests that the neural responses upon peer feedback may influence subsequent choice. Our results show that Mara van der Meulen and Jolanda Veldhuis contributed equally to this work. * Mara van der Meulen 1 Department of Psychology, Faculty of Social Sciences, Leiden University, Wassenaarseweg 52, 2333 AK Leiden, The Netherlands 2 Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition, Leiden, The Netherlands 3 Department of Communication Science, Media Psychology Program, VU University Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands media-by-peer interactions have pronounced effects on girls’ body ideals. Keywords Peer influence . Media effects . Ideal-body imagery . Adolescents . Body image . FMRI . Self-esteem Adolescence, which is the age period between approximately 10 and 22 years, is an important developmental period for social reorientation and identity development (Steinberg, 2008). Media content matters in social development, especially for adolescents who socialize largely with their peers in media(ted) environments (e.g., Facebook; Brown & Bobkowski, 2011; Konijn, Veldhuis, Plaisier, Spekman, & Den Hamer, 2015). This is well exemplified by the development of body image in late adolescent girls. Thin-ideal body portrayals are overrepresented in contemporary media fare (e.g., Grabe, Ward, & Hyde, 2008; Lopez-Guimera, Levine, Sanchez-Carracedo, & Fauquet, 2010), while the prevalence of overweight and obesity is still increasing (WHO, 2015). This discrepancy underscores how bodies as they appear in media are not only unrealistic (especially in comparison to the actual female population; Fouts & Burggraf, 2000) but also unattainable (as graphic software is heavily used to adapt body shapes to be ultra-slender and toned; Derenne & Beresin, 2006). Late adolescent girls form a particularly sensitive group to internalize the thin-body ideal (Grabe et al., 2008; Groesz, Levine, & Murnen, 2002; Veldhuis, Konijn, & Seidell, 2012), and may subsequently experience negative body affects, such as body dissatisfaction. Indeed, it has been shown that body dissatisfaction increases across adolescence, reaching its highest level in late adolescence (Bearman, Presnell, Martinez, & Stice, 2006; Bucchianeri, Arikian, Hannan, Eisenberg, & Neumark-Sztainer, 2013). Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci (2017) 17:712–723 Among late adolescent girls, not only media but also peers are important intensifiers of body-ideal perceptions (Jones & Smolak, 2011; Keery, van den Berg, & Thompson, 2004). Research shows that peer feedback is likely vital in shaping adolescent girls’ ideas about body ideals. For example, peer comments indicating thin-ideal media models to be Bonly a few kilos underweight^ resulted in negative body perceptions among adolescent girls (Veldhuis, Konijn, & Seidell, 2014b). Concurrently, studies in the field of developmental neuroscience have demonstrated the importance of peer feedback in relation to social norms (e.g., Crone, Will, Overgaauw, & Güroğlu, 2014). How media exposure and peer feedback interact in influencing late adolescents’ body standards is not well understood, but neural measures might be a useful tool in investigating the underlying mechanisms of this relationship, as it is less sensitive to socially desirable answers. The present study examined brain activation upon exposure to media model imagery followed by peer feedback. The neural correlates of peer feedback have previously been studied using social judgment paradigms (Gunther Moor, van Leijenhorst, Rombouts, Crone, & Van der Molen, 2010). In these studies, participants were presented a picture of a peer who had evaluated them based on their online profile, and they were subsequently asked to indicate whether they thought the peer liked them based on a first impression. This judgment was followed by ostensible peer feedback, which could be congruent or incongruent with the participant’s answer (i.e., BI expect to be accepted,^ followed by peer feedback signaling acceptance [congruent] or rejection [incongruent]). These studies revealed common activity in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and insula when receiving incongruent feedback (Gunther Moor et al., 2010; Guyer et al., 2014; Somerville, Heatherton, & Kelley, 2006). This ACC-insula network is also typically observed when individuals make social choices that are different from their own social norm (Guroglu, van den Bos, Rombouts, & Crone, 2010; van den Bos, van Dijk, Westenberg, Rombouts, & Crone, 2011). Additionally, prior studies in adults demonstrated that the ACC-insula is more active when participants receive incongruent feedback from peers about music popularity (Berns, Capra, Moore, & Noussair, 2010), music preference (Campbell-Meiklejohn, Bach, Roepstorff, Dolan, & Frith, 2010) and attractiveness of faces (Klucharev, Hytonen, Rijpkema, Smidts, & Fernandez, 2009), suggesting that activity in the ACC-insula network reflects deviance of (social) norms (Rilling & Sanfey, 2011) or deviance from (social) expectations (Somerville et al., 2006). Thus, the current personal perception versus peer feedback paradigm provides a promising method to examine how late adolescent girls process peer feedback on ideal-body media imagery that is either consistent or inconsistent with their own personal judgment, especially when neural responses are measured during such a paradigm. Neural mea (...truncated)