Body Talk on Social Networking Sites and Appearance Anxiety among College Students: The Mediating Role of Self-objectification and Moderating Role of Gender

Jiayi Ruan ¹ Ruicong Yu ² Yunfeng Zhao ¹ Yaqi Mei ^1*

• ¹ Anhui Medical University, Hefei, China
• ² School of Medicine, Southeast University, Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, China

The prominence of social media has improved college students' communication and interpersonal skills to a certain extent. However，discussions on the pursuit of ideal beauty are often found on social networking sites and are even believed to have triggered appearance anxiety among users. In the current study, 512 college students completed questionnaires containing the Appearance Conversations with Friends Scale, the Appearance Anxiety Scale-Brief Version, and the Body Surveillance Subscale of the Objectified Body Consciousness Scale. Furthermore, 1,011 actual social media data entries were analyzed to complement the empirical framework. The results showed that college students' body talk on social networking sites, appearance anxiety, and self-objectification were significantly positively correlated. Body talk on social networking sites had a significant positive predictive effect on appearance anxiety, with self-objectification having a partial mediating effect. Gender played a significant moderating role between social media body talk and appearance anxiety (β = 0.53, p < 0.01), with male students' social media body talk positively predicting appearance anxiety more significantly than female students (β = 0.52, p < 0.05). These findings may be helpful for developing targeted interventions to reduce the risk of appearance anxiety among college students who often talk about their appearance on social networking sites.