Perceived Exposure and Acceptance Model of Appearance-Related Health Campaigns: Roles of Parents’ Healthy-Appearance Talk, Self-Objectification, and Interpersonal Conversations

Abstract

Excessive focus on appearance or lookism requires social attention as it can have negative consequences on individuals’ psychological and mental states related to health and sustainable social practice. As part of a healthy and sustainable social practice, this study tests the mechanism of enhancing appearance-related health campaign’s effectiveness through the O1-S-O2-R framework. Participants were 220 Korean college students with being 141 male and 78 female and they completed an on-line survey. The result of SEM analyses confirmed the O1-S-O2-R model. As the result of hypotheses testing, health campaign contents suggesting anti-lookism and diverse beauty standards have attracted the attention of people whose parents conversed using relatively less healthy-appearance talk when growing up and who had higher self-objectification scores with body surveillance and body shame. Interpersonal conversations and thoughts on the media content played a mediating role in the model, while health campaigns had a higher persuasive effect on campaign evaluation and the behavior intention of spreading the campaign’s content. Implications of the findings were discussed regarding health campaign designers and individuals, including parents, in education settings.