Video Chat Usage and Appearance Satisfaction in Context

When Covid-19 struck the United States in early March, the typical lives to which people had grown accustomed rapidly changed as people were forced to adapt to their new normal. One of the drastic changes for many people was the novel necessity for the majority of communications, whether for business or pleasure, to be moved online. Video chatting services, such as Zoom and Google Hangout, bring with them a unique situation that provokes important questions regarding appearance satisfaction as users are put in an unusual situation of viewing themselves while they talk to others. With past research indicating that exposure to images of others can negatively influence personal body satisfaction in females (Fitzsimmons-Craft et al., 2014; Thompson, Heinbert, Altabe, & Tantleff-Dunn, 1999; Tiggemann & Slater, 2014), and social comparison is one of the main explanations for the negative association between exposure to media and body dissatisfaction (Fitzsimmons-Craft et al., 2014; Vartanian & Dey, 2013), the question becomes: What influence does video chat usage, and the constant opportunity for comparison, have on women’s appearance satisfaction? Furthermore, body surveillance, or the awareness of how one looks from another’s perspective (McKinley & Hyde, 1996), is consistently accessible as video chat users are able to see how others are viewing them in real time. With past social media research indicating that body surveillance moderates the association between photo investment and bulimia symptomology (Cohen et al., 2018), it is possible that people who experience higher levels of body surveillance while video chatting, may also show lower levels of appearance satisfaction. Finally, with other work indicating that comparing one’s appearance to a peer is more strongly associated with negative appearance satisfaction relative to comparison with celebrities (Fardouly, Pinkus, Vartanian, 2017), the context of the video calls becomes important to take into account. The current study will investigate the influence of video chat usage on appearance satisfaction, whether social comparison and body surveillance moderate the strength of these associations, and whether these associations differ as a function of video chat contexts.