Be Your Body's Friend

Creating a positive college environment regarding body image concerns is warranted given their strong association with eating disorders (EDs) and the alarming rates of EDs on college campuses. There is also a growing need to universally diversify ED prevention programs, explore the multidimensional construct of body image, and enhance selective prevention recruitment initiatives. This dissertation examined 132 undergraduate students in a universal and mixed gendered setting, their classrooms. Participants in the intervention condition received a single session of the Be Your Body’s Friend presentation, an adapted cognitive dissonance-based intervention aimed at reducing ED risk factors. The control condition included participants who received a general classroom lecture. Females and males in the two conditions were compared at pre, post, and 1-month follow-up timepoints on appearance-ideal internalization (thin-ideal and muscular-ideal), body image satisfaction, body image experiences related to quality of life, and behavioral intention to enroll in a selective ED prevention program, known as the Body Project (Becker, Rhode, & Shaw, 2012). Repeated measure analyses showed that those in the intervention condition significantly lowered muscular-ideal internalization scores at follow-up when compared to the control condition. Collectively, the findings suggest that it is important to explore the role of muscularity in ED development for females and other underlying dimensions of body image, namely body appreciation. Mixed gendered settings might also benefit from cultivating conversations regarding the social injustices of beauty standards and adding intervention components, such as focus groups. These adjustments may help enhance the levels of cognitive dissonance experienced by participants to increase body image satisfaction and behavioral intention to enroll in the Body Project.