Empowerment Sold Separately: Two Experiments Examine the Effects of Ostensibly Empowering Beauty Advertisements on Women’s Empowerment and Self-Objectification

Measuring Gaze: Women’s Visual Processing of Empowerment and Objectification Messages in Empowerment-Themed Advertisements

“…empowerment. These findings are in line with the initial study by Couture Bue and Harrison (2019), confirming that visual content used in ETAs limited their effectiveness-if effectiveness is to be defined as a feeling of empowerment among their audiences. The photos in this study reflect industry norms and were rated in a pretest study as relatively empowering; thus, while they appear to be empowering, there was no evidence in this study that they produced feelings of empowerment in viewers.…”

“…Feelings of empowerment can be difficult to quantify via self-report (Dolničar & Fortunati, 2014;Thomas & Velthouse, 1990;Zimmerman, 1995), as the manifestations of feeling empowered change over time and behaviors are both context-and person-specific. As with prior research on ETAs (e.g., Couture Bue & Harrison, 2019), the current study uses the Affective Empowerment Checklist (AECL-24), an adaption of the Multiple Affective Adjective Checklist (Zuckerman & Lubin, 1965), to measure how strongly participants endorse 24 adjectives related to empowerment. Thus, the AECL measures the individual's perceived emotional state at the time of measurement.…”

“…The study by Couture Bue and Harrison (2019) raised concerns about increased self-objectification when presented with ETAs. The current study suggests that ETAs are an improvement over traditional ads in this area, as they led to significantly less self-objectification than photos paired with OCs.…”

Framing real beauty: A framing approach to the effects of beauty advertisements on body image and advertising effectiveness

“…Conversely, an idealized model may match the appearance focused message of a passive body frame, but can mismatch the empowering message of an active body or subject frame. Displaying a thin model complying to conventional beauty standards might thus overrule the progressive message of the frame (Couture & Harrison, 2019). On the other hand, an active body or subject frame may weaken the negative effects of an idealized model and this mismatch may help to create a more nuanced message.…”

Non-Sexualized Images and Body-Neutral Messaging Foster Body Positivity Online

“…These findings stand somewhat in contrast to past work that suggests that the positive effect of captions may not be enough to subdue the effect of accompanying images. Messages that accompanied images that were body-positive (Tiggemann et al, 2020), empowering (Couture Bue & Harrison, 2019; Halliwell et al, 2011; Hendrickse et al, 2021), or pointed out the unrealistic nature of images (Fardouly & Holland, 2018) did not overshadow the influence of the images; the visuals appeared to be more powerful than the text. Our results do lend some degree of support to this contention as well.…”