MY philosophy of self perception The negative portrayal of women in the media and self precepion

 

Hello my lovely audience thanks for reading my blog . Happy holidays spread love not hate . Corona-virus has changed our society but I would like to  remind my readers or anyone in the world that Allah will protect us from evil never  lose hope in the future and power of Allah. In addition, I have learned to be strong and independent and caring about other but I don't care what people think about me because I know the important thing is how you see yourself . There fore positive mindset and attitude increase anyone's ability to see themselves as informed influential people because the people who matter to you will see me or any other person the way the individual  sees his or her self. Society is going to precede you the best way you see yourself so always be happy with what you have  Remove your negative thoughts   more lessons from me 1 never underestimate your abilities in life don't compare yourself to others everyone has their own own path talents . Don't dwell on the past  it doesn't matter you  you cant change the past but the you can change your future. You have to love yourself because people are only going to love you if you love your self your family and your friends alhamdullah for everything 

Early on in our childhood, somewhere around when most of us are entering school, an amazing thing happens. We start to become aware of ourselves and our role in the surrounding environment. This is a tremendous achievement, something humans specialize in.

This awareness of ourselves allows us to become whoever we want to be. It allows us to fluidly change from moment-to-moment and act in different ways in different scenarios.

Unfortunately, we often accidentally take this power and turn it against ourselves. We eliminate the possibility of becoming something better and tie ourselves up in an inescapable knot, all while believing we are working toward our comfort and happiness.

This knot is the result of the beliefs we’ve created that define us, determining how we will act before we have time to consider what we consciously want.

Our awareness of ourselves allows us to create a self-perception to categorize and label ourselves. This self-perception can help us reach our dreams or lead us down a road of misery.

Our Self-Perception Will Define Us for Better or for Worse

Every day we interact with both new and familiar people. Each of them is guided by their self-perception.

Most people base their decisions on their prior beliefs about themselves. What’s worse is they often don’t realize when they’re doing it. They let predetermined labels make the decisions for them moment after moment while they consciously wonder why they aren’t moving toward the person they hope to be.

Once you realize this fact, you have the opportunity to change your life little by little.

How to Use Self Awareness to Improve Your Life

First off, you will likely never know the full scope of your self-perception. The ideas we create about ourselves are so extensive and complex that we can only do our best to get a rough understanding of some of the ways we think about ourselves.

Through small realizations, we can hope to make great gains in the long run.

Step 1: Pay Attention to Your Routines

The first step to making your self-perception work for you is paying attention to the routines and thought patterns you find yourself coming back to regularly. These are the ideas and actions you are most connected to. These are the ideas that will build you to new heights or tear you down brick by brick.

An easy way to catch your routines is to start asking yourself what you’re doing at that moment and why you’re doing it. Take a moment in the morning or at night and quickly go over some of the more important parts of your day.

What things are you doing?

Do you enjoy doing them, or is there something else you’d like to try for the day.

You might decide to completely change the structure of your day, but it’s more likely you’ll discover 1 or 2 areas where you can improve. This can be as simple as changing the way you get to and from the places you have to go to, or it could be complex as spending more time with people you wouldn’t usually talk to.

What are the one or two things you’d like to change during your day?

Routines are usually created with good intentions, but over time they can become suboptimal, leading to missed opportunities throughout the day. Thus, they must be analyzed if you want to change your self-perception for the better.

Step 2: What Does Your Best Self Look Like?

The end goal of creating a better self-perception is to become the person that lives their ideal life. To make this happen, you must know the goal you’re shooting for.

What personality traits do you hope to exemplify more of? What opportunities do you want to take? How do you want to feel each day? These are all things you must be aware of.

Understanding your ideal self requires consistent reflection along with a little inspiration. You must look back on the things that made you feel happy and fulfilled. Be mindful of the emotions and physical conditions you enjoy experiencing. With these, you can start to create a vision for your future.

Here are a few practices that might help you get a clearer picture:

Visualization. Taking a few minutes to create a mental picture of your ideal life can be very helpful. How do feel in the visualization? What are doing with your life? How do you spend your quiet moments?

Journaling. Journaling can be a great practice for reflecting on the main things you focus on during your day. What moments have brought you the most happiness in the past few weeks? What thoughts do you keep having?

Moments of silence. Sometimes, all we need is a little quiet time to ourselves. It can be hard to be fully aware of what we want if we’re always engaging in things that require our attention. Just a few minutes every week can be enough to take inventory of your values and goals.

Step 3: Identify 1 to 3 Things You Can Do Today

Once you’ve determined where to aim your sights, you can start to move in that direction. Instead of focusing on accomplishing everything at once, allow yourself to focus on one to three things you can do today to make a difference.

This allows you to concentrate on the areas you determined to be most important without feeling overwhelmed by the changes. The key to change is it must be sustainable, adding too many changes into your day often becomes too much to manage.

You get to choose whatever you want to do for that day. Your goals could be the same thing(s) each day or you could go in a completely new direction.

Allow yourself to set these intentions one day at a time. Your wishes may be completely different a week from now, let yourself move in the direction you wish to at that moment.

Change is often slow at first, but when you look back in a few months, you will be awed by some of the amazing changes that have occurred.

Step 4: Recognise and Celebrate the Changes

If you consistently focus on changing your life and you’re able to consistently take action on your wishes, your life will change. It’s an amazing feeling, so make sure to celebrate your accomplishments.

We usually take on challenges for that feeling of success when we finish. Don’t brush over this feeling. Become aware of it. Embrace it.

Every day we have large and small battles, showing ourselves that change is possible. We might know we’re capable of improving in one area of our life, but deny being able to change another area. Through removing and changing our previously held self-perception, we become more confident in ourselves and our ability to overcome every obstacle.

Every time you find yourself on the other side of something you once thought was impossible, take a moment to let yourself bask in the glory of your amazing potential.

Change Your Self-Perception, Change Your Life

Self-perception forms the basis of how we think and act. Through changing this perception, we allow ourselves to tremendously improve every day. One day you might just look back at your lifestyle

How portrayal of women in magazines and television affects their self-perception

Sarah Elgohary

    There are many studies on protrayals of women in the media and the relationship between media and women’s body image. The media has portrayed the expectations of women with regard to body image, occupation, and gender roles through the interpretation of magazines and television. As a result of this, from the time we are in our mother’s womb, there are guidelines, rules, and expectations on a person’s appearance, behavior, and how they interact with others. These are expectations that every individual in society is trained to follow and obey. 

Engeln-Maddox’s (2005) study analyzed how the image of women portrayed in media has negative impact on women self-esteem. The hypothesis of the study is that seeing women featured in advertisements has a negative psychological effect on females in society. This study involved 202 undergraduate women, and the research was conducted in two parts. In one part, the participants wrote and talked about three advertisements taken from recent women’s magazines. In the second part, women completed a number of self-reported measurements, focusing on body image in addition to their own miscellaneous body measurements. Engeln-Maddox used the scale from the 1984, study with 1 as the lowest rating of internalization and 5 as the highest. Regarding the body image their 5 measurements of internalization, 1 is internalization of the thin ideal (SATAQ) and 5 is Body Mass Index. With regards to media advertisements and women, the response of women to media portrayal of themselves is significantly correlated with greater internalization of ideals and decreased satisfaction with women’s own appearance and perception of themselves.  

 According to the Body Mass Index, women have many negative feelings about their body, which affects their self-esteem. The importance of this study is that it proves that women have poor self-esteem because of their body image. However, a limitation of this research is that it doesn’t explain why women have internalized these negative feelings. It would be beneficial if the study connected the body image survey to the ideal of beauty portrayed in the media based on the hypothesis that there is a negative correlation between women’s body image and the negative portrayal of women in media. 

A more recent study, Gurari, et al. (2006) explored the relationship between advertisements of women in media and their attitudes towards their own body image and self-worth.to prove that the women in this study were not influenced by the idealistic images of beauty in magazine advertisements. The hypothesis of the study is that women know their portrayal in media is derogatory, and they may feel bad but they do not show how they feel. They do not correct or protect themselves against the awfully inappropriate images, social comparisons, and other threats that the media gives society to young women. In this study there were seventy-two participants from Washington University, who were undergraduates from the age of 18 to 22. The participants were asked to complete three different tasks. First they completed primary tasks at computers, and then left the room .The second task was an advertising exercise in which the participants were presented 20 magazine advertisements from popular outlets; the participants were asked to identify the products and rate the effectiveness of 20 magazine advertisements. The third and final task was a body image test. Body image was examined by the subjects that were taking a short series of practice trials.  

The results of the study show that the women in this study were able to recognize the differences in response to the media advertisement images. They were able to recognize the difference between advertisements that have unrealistic expectations for a woman’s mind and body, and the ones that celebrate women’s identity and strengths. This is a very important point because it shows that the results supported the hypothesis.  

This study is proof of the way society has made so many rules and guidelines regarding the expectations of women’s appearance and behavior. This is because women are socialized to internalize the message of beauty ideals, and that appearance is more important than intellect or education. Society has guidelines that hinder women’s ability to be successful in professional careers. From childhood, she is forced to internalize the fact that her worth lies in beauty and not in intellect—she’s internalizing these things from media and from these advertisements. 

The study was weak in the sense that the experimenter spent too much time on complicated procedures that took away from how the women understood the advertisements in the study. One example of this would be how the participants had to stare at an asterisk on a screen for 750 milliseconds. This distracts them from what the study wants to accomplish. Because of the way the study was formatted, the results were affected. If the study was more direct and focused on the advertisements right away, without tedious medial tasks in-between, then the participants would have been more focused on the advertisements and their psychological effects. 

Willgosh (2001) conducted a similar study that represents historical and social influences on expectations, occupations, and gender roles for women. The hypothesis of the study is that the media influences women and girls; in addition, the study also represents the negative effects of media on their educational achievement and their career choices. There were 225 participants who were graduate students from NYU in the study. They had to watch a video of women from 1950, and then watch another video of women today and compare the differences. Then they had to complete a survey on the different expectations of women in the 1950s compared to today. The researchers discovered how quickly women are socialized to act a certain way. The results of the study did not support the hypotheses. This is because the researchers discovered that the expectations, occupations, and gender roles for women were the same in the 1950s as they are today, with the exception of women having to work to make their living while they support their families; in addition, both in the 1950s and today, women are taught by society to maintain the role of traditional wives and do all cooking, cleaning, laundry, and child care. Today most people do not have traditional families any more like they did in the 1950s--a man and woman married with three or more children. There are many different types of families, like step families and like divorced families.

This study is important because it reflects the results of how children are socialized differently based on their gender. Boys learn to play with action figures like GI Joe army toys and play with Lego. Society teaches boys to be strong, join the military, be good at math, build buildings, be engineers, and providers for women in society. On the other hand, young girls are trained by society and their parents to play with dolls, make up, easy bake ovens. Later on, in school girls learn that parents only want their sons to do better in math, so as a result girls’ attention in math decreases because they have internalized this message from their parents. In addition, society teaches young girls to be nurturing, to cook, clean, do laundry so they can learn to be good mothers and take care of children, while the men are only the providers in society. These expectations of women are realistic/and unrealistic for many reasons. First of all, it is very realistic for society to want and need caregivers, nannies, mothers to watch over, nurture, care for and raise children in society that reason is realistic. There are no rules, laws in society that segregates the care giving, and raising children is specifically the responsibility of only to women. The study made women aware of the fact that society wants them to be what society thinks they’re supposed to be rather than what they want to be in order to be successful. THIS study made women conscious of the fact that this was happening. This study shows how the media representation of women dictates what women are expected to be in society .As a result, of this media influences women to have a negative self-perception of themselves 

    Westerwick, Westerwick, Wills, & Gong, (2014) investigated how gender typed portrayals in magazine advertisements affect young women’s views of their future in an experiment that lasted for ten days. The hypothesis for this study is a theory driven hypothesis taken from social cognitive theory and social comparison theory. There is no actual hypothesis for this study There were 215 subjects in this study .In the experimental group the people viewed magazine pages with females in either professional or caretaker roles as beauty ideals. In contrast the control group did not view these magazines. The control group viewed magazines with no gender typed portrayals of women. The results of the study show that the women were more focused on their future rather than on the ideal image of beauty portrayed in the magazines. The media emphasizes more beauty ideals than strong role models for women. This portrayal is despite the fact that there has been increased advocacy for strong role models in media. Therefore, this situation proves that the perpetuation of traditional beauty ideals makes women feel more positively about their future. In addition, this study found that gender inequality has become a widely accepted goal (United Nations, 2000). This statistic is from the same study. For example, women’s participation in the work force has stayed steady for the past two decades at much lower rates than men (52% vs. 77%) (United Nations, 2010). The study shows that in fact, in recent years more men are staying home to care for their children either because more men are unemployed or they have responsibility for the kids, while the wife or mothers are working all day. The research indicates that women who have a baby and return to work have a stigma attached to them for having a baby because employers and coworkers think that women cannot perform their job the way that they did before having the baby and sometimes women are fired from their job for taking extra time on maternity leave. Society has so many different double standards for men and women. For example, if a father stays home to take care of his children while the mother is out working, society will look down on him because he is too nurturing. The researchers provide another example of a double-standard between men and women in society which includes the fact that society expects women not to get an education or a degree, not work and stay home taking care of the children and the house. Society needs to understand that in order for women to raise their children and be good mothers all women need to have equality.

Lauren, et al (2006) performed a content analysis on six different broadcasting stations which revealed differences between scripted programs and reality TV shows. The hypothesis is the presence of women behind the scenes was negatively related to the on screen representation. Furthermore the women behind the scenes were less effective at eliminating gender differences in the portrayal of conflict resolution. The method of the study involved the examination of character portrayals in comedies, dramas and reality shows that aired on six different broadcasting stations which were (ABC, CBS, NBC, WB, UPN,) during 2004 – 2005. One episode of every series was chosen for analysis there was a total of 129 TV shows and there was a random sample of TV shows. Whether it is from movies, radio, or internet the reaction of young adolescents to media violence is the same. The problem is that media messages that emphasize violence could induce violence in teens. This experiment proves that adolescents are very easily persuaded by media messages in society; racism, violence, sex, prejudice towards the elderly and many more negative ideals. As a result, the messages are submerged into the minds of teenagers. The messages negatively influence the morals that have been taught to them by their parents, which may lead them to commit crimes. The limitation of this study is that it is a qualitative study, and it took too much time.

This study intends to expand upon the results of many past studies. The proposed study will examine the issue of the media sending the wrong messages in society that emphasize the wrong ideals for women such as supermodel ideals and impossible beauty expectations As a result, society today has portrayed negative expectations of women with regard to body image, occupation, and gender roles; through the interpretation of television and magazines an-d television. From the time we are in our mother’s womb, there is a set of many guidelines, rules expectations, images on how a person is supposed to look like, act, interact with other people that every individual in society is trained to follow and obey. It has been hypothesized that societal rules, guidelines, and expectations are based on a person’s gender, race, and socioeconomic standing which can inhibit forward progress for any marginalized group, especially for women. These guidelines are detrimental because they create an unrealistic expectation that women are forced to follow in order to be considered valuable or worthy of respect. By way of magazine advertisements and television shows, these forms of media project a negative image of woman in that they produce a stereotype of what a woman should be (instead of what a woman is) Based on my research findings it has been hypothesized that women who are exposed to media will have a negative perception of their image and self.  

Your literature review is much clearer now. Be sure to check apa style for citing author names. Also, try to limit the amount of text that is your own thoughts on the topic. You can write your own thoughts in a sentence or two when you are interpreting each study’s results but your thoughts should relate back specifically to the study you are describing. Overall, very nice job incorporating the comments from your original paper.

References

Guarari, I., Hetts, J. J., & Strube, M. J. (2006). Beauty in the "I of the beholder effects of ideals media portrayal on implicit self image. Journal of basic and applied Social Psychology, 28((3), 273--282. 

Lauren, M. M, Dozler, D. M., & Cleveland, E. (2006). Genre matters an examination of women working behind the Scenes and on Screen portrayal in reality and scripted Prime time programming. Journal of Springer Science, 1(23).445-464. 

Maddox, R. E. (nod.). Cognitive response to ideals media images of women; the relationship of social comparison and critical processing to the body image disturbance in college women. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 24, 1114-11138. 

Westerwick, S. K., Westerwick, A. R., Wills, L., & Gong, Y. (2014). A Crack in the Crystal ball? prolonged exposure to media portrayal of Social roles affects possible future 

selves. Journal of Communication Research, 4(6), 739-759.

Wills, L. (2001). Enhancing girls and talents of women and Girls. Journal of High Ability Studies, 12(1), 45-59.