Young men steadily catch up to young women in online appearance anxiety

Young people who spend a lot of time comparing their bodies and faces to others on the internet often maintain high levels of these appearance concerns throughout their teens and into young adulthood. While those who engage less with social media start out with lower levels of appearance preoccupation, their concerns tend to rise over time until almost all youth share similar burdens. These patterns were detailed in a recent study published in the journal Psychology of Popular Media.

The visual nature of the modern internet has created a continuous stream of idealized imagery. From heavily edited photos of friends to curated videos of celebrities, young people face a barrage of content that encourages them to evaluate their own looks. This behavior is called online appearance preoccupation.

Online appearance preoccupation involves frequently comparing one’s physical traits to people deemed more attractive. It also includes spending excessive time managing one’s own digital self-presentation. This might mean repeatedly checking photos, using filters to hide perceived flaws, or constantly seeking validation through likes and comments.

Previous research has linked this digital fixation to a host of mental health struggles. Symptoms of depression, social anxiety, and disordered eating tend to be higher among people who heavily curate their online presence. Researchers wanted to know how these thought patterns evolve as teenagers grow into adults.

A key goal was to identify whether foundational emotional struggles or existing social media habits shape the trajectory of a person’s digital appearance concerns. Most prior inquiries into this topic captured just a single snapshot in time. A snapshot cannot reveal whether a teenager’s intense focus on online aesthetics fades or hardens into a permanent fixture of their adult psychology.

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To answer these questions, Griffith University psychology researcher Melanie J. Zimmer-Gembeck led an investigation that tracked the same group of young people over five years. Zimmer-Gembeck and her colleagues sought to understand how gender, emotional health, and technology habits influence how appearance concerns develop. They also wanted to know if certain groups of young people are more vulnerable to escalating anxieties than others.

The researchers recruited 565 Australian students for the project. The participants were between the ages of thirteen and twenty-two when the data collection began. Approximately sixty percent of the participants were young women, and forty percent were young men. The adolescents and young adults completed three comprehensive surveys distributed over a five-year period.

During each survey phase, the students answered questions about their social media habits and emotional wellbeing. They rated how strongly they agreed with statements assessing their daily social media usage frequency. The participants also completed questionnaires designed to identify symptoms of social anxiety, such as a fear of negative evaluation by peers.

Other sections of the survey measured feelings of depression, such as persistent loneliness and sadness. To quantify online appearance preoccupation, the youth reported how much their feelings about their bodies were influenced by the pictures other people posted online. They also indicated how much effort they put into their own online appearance.

When looking at the baseline data collected in the first year, certain patterns emerged immediately. Young women reported higher levels of online appearance preoccupation compared to young men. Higher levels of digital preoccupation were also closely tied to intense social media use among all participants. Participants who reported more depressive symptoms and higher social anxiety scores during the initial survey similarly demonstrated an intense focus on their digital presentation.

As the researchers analyzed the data across the full five years, the changes over time revealed two distinct trajectories. For participants who exhibited an initially high level of online appearance preoccupation, those concerns remained steadily high as the years passed. This highly preoccupied group largely consisted of young women, intense social media users, and those with higher baseline anxiety or depression scores.

Their focus on digital aesthetics did not fade as they matured. Instead, for youth already grappling with mental health challenges or heavy internet usage, a high degree of digital body anxiety appears to become a stable trait. Their preoccupation remained consistent through late adolescence and into early adulthood.

A quite different pattern appeared among the participants who started the study with relatively little concern about their digital appearance. This group initially included many of the young men and the individuals with low baseline social media usage. Over the five-year tracking period, this initially unbothered group experienced a steady increase in online appearance preoccupation.

As these youths progressed through adolescence and into emerging adulthood, their focus on digital comparisons grew. Their efforts to curate a perfect online image steadily rose to match the habits of their highly preoccupied peers. The researchers noted that this created a closing gap between the demographic groups.

Ultimately, the two distinct trajectories meant that nearly all the participants converged on a similar mindset. The young adults who started with low concern steadily caught up to those who started with high concern. By the final wave of the study, the vast majority of the participants reported a moderate to high degree of online appearance preoccupation.

The behavior became almost universal across the sample. It did not matter whether a participant was male or female, or whether they had started the tracking period with perfect mental health. A moderate level of online appearance preoccupation simply became the typical experience by later adolescence.

Gender differences were present at the start, but gender did not significantly alter the actual pace of change. Young men started at a lower baseline than young women, but their concern rose at a similar speed over time. This suggests that young men are not immune to digital image anxieties.

Psychologists believe that societal pressures placed on young women might trigger an earlier onset of appearance anxieties. Young women are frequently exposed to cultural messages that link their personal worth directly to their physical beauty. For young men, similar pressures regarding muscularity and grooming seem to arrive slightly later in their social development.

The same principle applied to mental health and technology habits. A high level of social media usage or emotional distress at the study’s onset reliably predicted who would start with the highest appearance concerns. Yet it was the youth with the lowest initial risk factors who experienced the most rapid growth in online appearance anxiety as they aged.

The findings offer a clear view of how appearance concerns develop over time. The researchers did acknowledge a few limitations in their approach. The final data collection point took place after a three-year gap, which coincided with the peak of the global pandemic. The unique social restrictions during that era might have heavily influenced how the participants engaged with the internet.

Tracking the youth across only three specific points in time also limited the researchers. It prevented them from detecting mild or temporary fluctuations in the data. With more frequent surveys, the scientists might have seen whether appearance anxieties dip and rise based on specific life events.

The study also focused on the general frequency of social media usage rather than its specific features. Different digital elements might shape appearance anxiety in varied ways. A focus on interactive features like follower counts, or exposure to specific aesthetic filters, could yield more detailed results in future projects.

The demographic makeup of the participants also presented a limitation. The sample was predominantly composed of teenagers of white European descent from one specific region of Australia. The trajectories observed in this group might not perfectly mirror the experiences of youth from other cultural backgrounds or geographic locations.

Future projects could track these digital behaviors starting from an even younger age to capture the earliest signs of anxiety. Researchers hope to measure body dissatisfaction directly alongside internet habits to see how the two interact in early childhood. It would also help to test the relationship in reverse, investigating whether early internet focus actually causes the onset of clinical depression.

Understanding when these digital concerns first escalate might help psychologists build better preventative tools. Early interventions could teach children how to process completely fabricated beauty standards before those standards harm their self-image. Protecting the emotional health of young internet users requires knowing exactly when their relationship with digital media turns sour.

The study, “Online Appearance Preoccupation in and Beyond Adolescence: A Longitudinal Study of Social Media Use, Anxiety, and Depression as Correlates of Growth and Stability,” was authored by Melanie J. Zimmer-Gembeck, Veya Seekis, and Amanda L. Duffy.