research file
based on attractiveness, prettiness or cuteness. The study found the women reacted differently to the images and spent more time looking at faces they thought should be rated attractive, compared to faces they considered pretty or cute. “This told me there was a difference between verbal codes of beauty,” says Geldart. “So we wanted to look at (social) media to see how these labels appear.” Over a six-month period Geldart and Burgoyne analyzed more than 160 print advertisements in a selection of Canadian and American women’s magazines for teens, adults and seniors. They also looked at television, billboard and website ads. Specifically, they looked for the words pretty, attractive, beautiful, hot, cute and gorgeous. The researchers were surprised by the results. “We originally searched for the attractive, cute, prettiness words or any derivatives of those,” says Burgoyne, an assistant professor in Youth and Children’s Studies at Laurier’s Brantford campus. “But what we discovered is that advertisers were using other words to sell their products.” The word beautiful did come up, but not in a significant percentage. Instead, Geldart and Burgoyne came across words like perfect and fabulous, or made-up words like “babe-licious.” In the magazines geared towards seniors, advertisers specifically used words like healthy and radiant. For teens, the most frequent words included cool, awesome, lean and picture-perfect. “We’re thinking that advertisers are using these words because they think these are the words that will make us want to buy these beauty products,” says Geldart. “And it seems they are adapting the words based on what they think beautiful means to those different age ranges.” With the content analysis now complete, Geldart and Burgoyne
deal due to reduced trust. In addition, students displayed a lower desire for future interactions. On the other hand, “deep acting” or more genuine anger decreased students’ demands (compared to showing no emotion) because the actors were perceived as being more tough, which is consistent with prior research on the effects of showing anger in negotiations. “Our study shows you may gain something if your anger is genuine,” says Hideg. “However, your strategy is going to backfire if you’re being fake and you’re not showing genuine emotion.” While the undergraduate students could tell when the actor was displaying fake anger, they could not say exactly why. The answer is in the way the face moves.
Researchers Stephanie Burgoyne, left, and Sybil Geldart.
are preparing to interview adolescents about beauty labels to see if the words used by advertisers mirror adolescent labels of beauty. The researchers say the study is important because it can help us be more conscious of the labels that advertisers are using, and help adolescents and their parents become more aware of any pressures young adults might face. “Young people are bombarded with the visual image of beauty, which is thinness, but now we’re also bombarding them with verbal cultural expressions associated with perfection,” says Geldart.
The videos of the actors were carefully coded, and researchers found that when people fake emotions, the muscles in the face don’t move symmetrically. One eyebrow may move more than the other, or only one side of the jaw may clench. One of Hideg’s new areas of research involves investigating cultural differences in reacting to fake and real anger. Most of the studies she has read so far suggest that people with dialectical reasoning — which is more dominant in Asian cultures — are more accepting of contradictory emotions. For example, you might realize someone is faking an emotion, but you don’t react negatively and assume it might just be a one-time event. However, people with low dialectical thinking — usually found in Western
Europe, Canada and the U.S. — assume that if someone is faking an emotion, they must be a bad person. “They make internal attributions that kind of discount the whole situation and they react negatively,” says Hideg. Hideg likes that her research has practical implications in the business community, as well as day-to-day life. “You buy a car, you buy a house, you negotiate with your spouse where you’re going to go on vacation, or perhaps you have children and need to debate what they are going to eat for dinner — we actually engage in negotiations a lot in our everyday lives. And there are always some emotions involved.”
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