negative body image talk, ethnic diversity, college students, African Americans, eating behavior
Abstract: Our study experimentally examined the effects of negative body talk on college students at a Historically Black University. Participants were randomly assigned to read a vignette that contained dialogue between friends while shopping. In the experimental condition, the dialogue contained negative body talk, while the control condition contained a neutral subject. After exposure to negative body talk, African American participants and White men showed greater self-reported eating pathology than those in the control group. Both men and women reported frequent engagement in negative body talk, although women reported more positive reasons for engaging in negative body talk than men did. Our study contributes to a small body of literature on negative body talk in ethnically diverse samples.
