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Abstract
In recent years, scholarly attention has been paid to fitness-promoting social media posts known as fitspiration, which have gained high popularity among young women. Research suggests that fitspiration posts on social media have the potential to promote positive health behaviors such as exercising. However, such content may also trigger unintended negative consequences for viewers’ body image perceptions and pose a threat to mental health. Little is known about the specific visual and verbal features of fitspiration posts that may respectively produce positive and negative effects. To address this gap, this dissertation focused on identifying specific message features of social media fitspiration content that could potentially affect young female viewers’ body image perceptions and exercise intentions. Informed by the objectification theory and the Modality, Agency, Interactivity and Navigability (MAIN) model, Study 1 used a focus-group approach to understand young women’s perceptions of fitspiration content and how that may affect their body image perceptions and exercise intentions. The results revealed a set of image features and themes in fitspiration captions and comments that could affect viewer perceptions. Among these themes, health- and appearance-related verbal messages were particularly salient for both body image and exercising. Study 2 experimentally tested the effects of health- versus appearance-focused captions and comments accompanying an objectified fitspiration post on body image perceptions and exercise intentions. State self-objectification was proposed and examined as a mediator to account for the effects on body image perceptions. The results revealed that viewing health-focused captions (but not comments) significantly lowered body dissatisfaction and promoted higher exercise intentions compared to viewing appearance-focused captions. However, state self-objectification did not mediate the proposed effects. Findings from this research generated novel knowledge about specific communicative features of fitspiration posts that could affect viewers’ self-perceptions and exercise intentions. Strategic use of fitspiration captions has the potential of mitigating unintended negative effects and guiding viewers’ self-perceptions and exercise in a positive direction. The findings inform objectification theory by advancing the knowledge about the effects of verbally objectifying cues. Furthermore, this research provides promising avenues for further investigation of fitspiration content under the framework of the MAIN model.