Journal of Psychosomatic Research
Volume 57, Issue 1 , Pages 73-78, July 2004

A word-stem completion task to assess implicit processing of appearance-related information

  • Marika Tiggemann

      Affiliations

    • Corresponding Author InformationCorresponding author. Tel.: +61-8-82012482; fax: +61-8-82013877
    • Flinders University of South Australia, School of Psychology, GPO Box 2100, Adelaide, SA 5001, Australia
    • ,
  • Duane Hargreaves

      Affiliations

    • Flinders University of South Australia, School of Psychology, GPO Box 2100, Adelaide, SA 5001, Australia
    • ,
  • Janet Polivy

      Affiliations

    • Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada
    • ,
  • Traci McFarlane

      Affiliations

    • Ambulatory Care for Eating Disorders, Toronto General Hospital, Toronto, ON, Canada

Received 24 December 2002; accepted 10 September 2003.

Abstract 

Objective

This paper reports on the development and utility of a new implicit measure of appearance-related information processing.

Methods

A 20-item word-stem completion task was constructed, in which each word stem could be completed with either an appearance-related word or at least one non-appearance alternative. The measure was tested in four different experiments, most investigating the impact of acute exposure to media-portrayed thin idealised female images.

Results

Exposure to media images or other appearance-related material led to the generation of more appearance- or weight-related words in both female and male samples.

Conclusion

It was concluded that the word-stem task has empirical utility as a simple, self-paced and sensitive outcome measure in experimental studies of media exposure. We conceptualise the word-stem task as a measure of appearance- and weight-schema activation.

Keywords:  Appearance schemas, Word stems, Media, Cognitive processing

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PII: S0022-3999(03)00565-8

doi:10.1016/S0022-3999(03)00565-8

Journal of Psychosomatic Research
Volume 57, Issue 1 , Pages 73-78, July 2004

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