The effects of video game and comic book character viewing on middle school boys' drive for muscularity and body satisfaction

The purpose of this experimental study was to determine whether viewing video game and comic book characters, depicting the current idealized muscular male body ideal, would affect 6th through 8th grade middle school boys' drive for muscularity and body satisfaction. A second purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between maturational timing and concomitant somatotypes and the drive for muscularity and body satisfaction in the same age group of boys. The participants of the study included 54 (n=54) middle school boys in grades 6 through 8 from two local middle schools in Humboldt County. Twenty-one (n=21) 6th graders, 15 7th graders and 18 8th graders were randomly assigned to one of three experimental groups; Control Group, Experimental Group 1 (muscular images) and Experimental Group 2 (non-muscular images). This study utilized the Drive for Muscularity Scale (DMS) (McCreary Sasse, 2000) to measure the subject degree of drive for muscularity and the Body Parts Satisfaction Scale (Slade et al, 1990) to evaluate levels of body satisfaction. The results did not support the hypothesis that boys who viewed pictures of hyper-muscled comic book and video game characters would have a higher drive for muscularity and lower body part satisfaction; in fact there was an overall decrease in DM and an increase in BPS pretest to posttest in this population. Additionally, a trend suggested that perceived mesomorphs had a greater DM than perceived endomorphs and ectomorphs.