Throughout our group meeting for our final paper we found a number of great articles to use in our final paper/presentation. One of the first and very interesting articles we found was written by three women, Marita P. McCabe, Kelly Butler, and Christina Watt and was titled, “Media Influences on Attitudes and Perceptions Toward the Body Among Adult Men and Women.” This project studied 60 men and 60 women, and found men overestimated their chest, waist, and thighs and underestimated their hips, while women overestimated the size of all body parts. This article is very helpful in that it supports our claim that the media has a negative influence on women and men and how they view themselves. A quote from the article that supports this is, Social pressure appears to be the main factor impacting on a woman’s body concern (Cusumano & Thompson, 1997), and the media appears to be the main source of this pressure (Heinberg, 1996). In the article it also says, “These thin body images have become normalized, and it is claimed that they contribute to the level of distorted perceptions and attitudes that women have of their body.” This is so true and it is one of the main points we would like to argue. Not everything on television is true. There is a thing called photoshop and celebrities use the unhealthiest ways to lose weight, that is why they are always fat then super skinny then fat then super skinny. We also found an ariticle titled, “The Media and Violent Behavior in Young People: Effects of the Media on Antisocial Aggressive Behavior in a Spanish Sample.” This article is by three men; Miguel Clemente, Pablo Espinosa and Miguel A. Vidal. Although this is a Spanish sample it is still a good source of information. They start out by using a real life example about a sixteen-year-old using a samurai sword to kill both his parents and sister. They explain that he is an avid Final Fantasy VIII player and was dressed exactly like his character when he was caught. In the article Johnson, Cohen, Smailes, Kasen, and Brook (2002) reported that males, but not females, who watched more television during early adolescence were prone to being more violent toward others, although no effect was found for other types of antisocial or criminal behaviors. Interestingly, results in the opposite direction have also been found. Hsieh (1996) found that viewing television violence is significantly associated with higher levels of aggression, especially among females, although this effect is less clear in the case of violence depicted in cartoons, particularly in older subjects. This article is kind of hard to follow at times so we probably won’t use a lot, if any, of the information provided.

Works Cited

McCabe, Marita P., Kelly Butler, and Christina Watt. Media Influences on Attitudes and Perceptions Toward the Body Among Adult Men and Women. School of Psychology-Deakin University, Apr. 2007. Web. 12 Apr. 2010. .

Clemente, Miguel, Pablo Espinosa, and Miguel A. Vidal. The Media and Violent Behavior in Young People: Effects of the Media on Antisocial Aggressive Behavior in a Spanish Sample. University of La Coruna, 24 Sept. 2008. Web. 12 Apr. 2010. .