The Effect Of Social Media Use On Appearance Anxiety Of College Students

Many years ago,with the influence of mass media such as TV and fashion magazines,"thin is beautiful" became the standard of beauty.Nowadays,although social media endows people with more multidimensional display space,the emphasis and display of external beauty is increasing instead of decreasing.From the perspective of communication studies,many scholars have made discussions on how the media shapes and influences the public’s appearance standards.However,whether and how social media use produces appearance anxiety is more important.Existing studies show that college students are generally dissatisfied with their appearance.Based on social culture theory,this study introduces personality factors in psychology to study the appearance anxiety of college students in the new social media environment and the influence of social media use on it.The main body of the study is divided into three parts: first,Firstly,the present situation of facial anxiety and gender distribution of college students were investigated and analyzed.Secondly,this study tested the effect of different social media use on appearance anxiety,and examined the moderating effect of personality traits.Finally,the study focused on the most significant effect of social media attention,investigated the specific mechanism,and built a model of the impact of social media attention on appearance anxiety.Through the empirical study of 490 survey samples,it is found that appearance anxiety is common among college students.The neuroticism of college students are positively correlated with the degree of appearance anxiety,the extroversion of college students are negative correlated with the degree of appearance anxiety.The time,frequency and intensity of social media use did not have a significant direct effect on appearance anxiety,only the attention to information on social media showed a significant effect.However,for college students with different extroverted and neurotic personality traits,the time of social media use,the intensity of social media use,and the attention to information on social media showed different effects on appearance anxiety.Further research on the mechanism of the most significant effect of information attention on face anxiety found that media pressure and appearance comparison played a completely mediating role in the relationship between social media information attention and appearance anxiety,the relationship between social media attention by three intermediary role path significantly positive forecast appearance anxiety.Finally,based on the research findings,this paper puts forward some suggestions to reduce the appearance anxiety of college students,and discusses the innovation and shortcomings of the research.