Investigating the effectiveness of treatment to correct cognitive bias towards physical appearance on body image concerns in college students

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

• Ali pakizeh ¹
• sadegh hekmatiyan fard ²
• Marzieh Baqeri ³

¹ Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, Faculty of Literature and Humanities, Persian Gulf University, Bushehr, Iran.

² PhD student in psychology, Persian Gulf University, Bushehr, Iran

³ Master's degree in General Psychology, Persian Gulf University, Bushehr, Iran

10.22067/tpccp.2024.79496.1395

Abstract

Purpose: The present study was conducted with the aim of investigating the effect of correcting girls' cognitive bias towards physical appearance on their concern about body image.

Method: The research method in this study was semi-experimental and using a pre-test and post-test design with a control group. The statistical population of the research includes female students of non-profit Foulad Industrial University, who were studying in the academic year 2018-2019. At first, using the purposeful sampling method, about 200 female students of the mentioned university were selected and asked to complete the body image questionnaire. Then, 30 students whose questionnaire scores were above the cut-off point were selected and randomly divided into two experimental (22 people) and control (23 people) groups. The research tools were: Littleton's body image questionnaire and dot probe task. First, a pre-test was taken from both groups, and then 8 sessions of 30 to 40 minutes were held individually for the experimental group. During this time, the control group did not receive any training. After the completion of the training, a post-test was taken from both groups and the collected data were analyzed by spss software, which used one-way analysis of covariance in the descriptive part of the mean and standard deviation indicators, and in the inferential statistics part. became.

Findings: The findings showed that correcting cognitive bias towards physical appearance reduces cognitive bias towards physical appearance and reduces concern about body image in female students. Cognitive bias correction can be used as an effective method.

Conclusion: correction of cognitive bias provided the ability to reduce bias towards physical appearance and reduce concern about body image among students.

Keywords

• Cognitive bias correction
• body image
• physical appearance

Main Subjects

• Clinical psychology

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