Single exposure to disclaimers on airbrushed thin ideal images increases negative thought accessibility

• Women were first exposed to the thin ideal with or without a disclaimer.
• Two weeks and two months later they were exposed to the thin ideal only.
• Negative thought accessibility was measured each time via a lexical decision task.
• Disclaimer increased negative thought accessibility irrespective of session.
• Disclaimers thus might have unintended negative consequences on women.

Disclaimers on airbrushed thin ideal images can attract attention to the thin ideal standard promoted by the advertisements, which can be damaging rather than helpful. In this study, 48 female college students were exposed to a thin ideal image including a disclaimer, a neutral sentence, or nothing. Two weeks and two months after this, they were again exposed to the same image but with no accompanying text in any of the conditions. Negative thought accessibility was assessed three times, after each exposure to the thin-ideal image, using reaction time measures. Participants randomly assigned to the disclaimer condition systematically showed greater accessibility of negative thoughts than those in the other two conditions, irrespective of the time of measurement. These results suggest that disclaimers on airbrushed images may have some counter-productive effects by accentuating the problems that they precisely aim to address.