ALTERNATIVE ASSESSMENT:

Questions:
1. What is the key topic(s) of interest, and why is it worth studying?
Analysing how beauty, self-compassion, and travel are represented
through the use of social media platforms, such as TikTok impacts young
women with their shame, anxiety, and low self-compassion which has
detrimental effects. However, this article mentions the importance that
compassionate videos can increase the self-compassion of young women.
This topic about the mental health of young women and social media
platforms is worth studying as it is a prominent issue within society and
issues such as weight and body image are a concern.

2. Were any specific hypotheses or predictions stated or implied? If so,

describe them.
It was predicted that self-compassion would be lower with beauty content
and shame, appearance anxiety, and negative mood would be higher for
with travel control and self-compassion groups. Whereas shame, anxiety,
and negative moods would be lower for self-compassion and higher in self-
compassion in relation to travel control. Expanding on the prediction with
further research, it was also predicted that content related to beauty, travel
control, and self-compassion groups, beauty would be lower in comparison
with appearance thoughts.

3. Describe the participants (e.g., how many, any relevant characteristics)

There were 115 undergraduate women aged between 17 -25 who were
from introductory psychology courses at a public university in Australia.
Participants received course credit and entered a draw to win a $50 dollar
gift card in exchange for voluntary participation in the research study.70.4%
identified as being Caucasian, 13% were identified as Asian, 5.3% were
Southeast Asian, 3.5% were African, 1.7% were identified as Australian
Aboriginal, 0.9% were Middle Eastern and 5.2% identified as Other. The
participant's daily usage of social media averaged 3.56 hours and the
highest use of social media was identified as TikTok (43.5%) with
Facebook and Twitter being the lowest (4.3%) of the sample.
4. Imagine you were a participant in this study. Describe what you were
required to do (e.g., identify the tasks that were administered, describe
what each task entailed). If multiple experiments were reported, answer this
question for Experiment 1 only.

I was required to watch three sets of videos containing a 7-minute

complication of TikTok videos related to beauty, self-compassion, and
travel. One of the tasks for the beauty videos contained videos related to
skincare, Botox before and after and makeup tutorials. For the self-
compassion video content related to young women suggesting self-
compassion strategies or personal stories to improve moods and self-care.
And for the travel video task, videos represented various landscapes and
locations. We were told what videos would be included in the task such as
the videos were from female creators, for travel, beauty, self-care, and
coping mechanisms for stress. It was asked to indicate how represented
each topic were with the mentioned topics and female creators were of
idealised beauty standards between 1 (low) and 7 (high). Videos were
rated on the visual, audio and representativeness of content.

5. Briefly describe how the descriptive statistics were presented (e.g.,

tables,figures).
The descriptive statistics were presented in the form of one table which had
the mean and standard deviation for TikTok on appearance shame and
anxiety, self-compassion, positive mood, and appearance thoughts. It had
the three categories split; Beauty group, self-compassion group, and travel
control group.

6. Briefly describe the results in relation to the hypotheses. Were the

predictions supported? What conclusions did the researchers make?
There was an upward appearance of thoughts reported in the beauty group
than in the self-compassion group and travel control groups, thus
supporting the hypothesis. However contrary to the purposed hypothesis,
there was no difference in the comparison of appearance between the self-
compassion and travel control groups. It was suggested that women
compare themselves more to beauty TikTok’s as they are represented by
ideal beauty standards compared to self-compassion videos as they tend to
wear little makeup.
7. Identify any concepts/theories/techniques mentioned in the article that
have been covered in lectures or tutes in 1002PSY
As seen in the content covered in 1002PSY, developmental psychology explores
how social expectations can shape the development of an individual. For example,
social norms indicate that women wear pink and males wear blue. This concept can
be associated with this study as women as defined by beauty standards wear
makeup and specific fashion to look ideal, thus beauty videos represent these
standards.