Pamela Keel, FSU – Facebook and Eating Disorders

A lot is being written about the psychological effects of social media. Dr. Pamela Keel, a Florida State University psychologist, focuses her research on the association between Facebook and a higher propensity for developing an eating disorder.

Pamela K. Keel, Ph.D., is Professor of Psychology and Director of the Eating Behaviors Research Clinic at Florida State University. She received her A.B. in Anthropology summa cum laude from Harvard University in 1992, Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Minnesota in 1998 and completed her clinical psychology internship at Duke University Medical Center in 1998. Dr. Keel has received grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for her research on the nosology, biology, epidemiology, and longitudinal course of bulimic syndromes.

In addition, Dr. Keel is co-Principal Investigator and co-Director of the NIMH-funded Integrated Clinical Neuroscience Training Program at Florida State University and is the Director of Clinical Training for Florida State University’s Clinical Psychology doctoral program. She has authored over 150 papers and two books on the topic of eating disorders. Within her NIH-funded program of research, Dr. Keel defined and characterized Purging Disorder as a potentially new disorder of eating, and this work has contributed to the inclusion of Purging Disorder as an Otherwise Specified Feeding or Eating Disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 5th Edition (DSM-5). She currently serves on the editorial board of the International Journal of Eating Disorders and is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Abnormal Psychology. Dr. Keel was elected as a Fellow of the Academy for Eating Disorders (AED) in 2006 and Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science (APS) in 2013. She served as President for the Eating Disorders Research Society in 2009-2010 and is the immediate Past-President for the Academy for Eating Disorders. Finally, Dr. Keel has been appointed as a standing member of the Adult Psychopathology and Disorders of Aging (APDA) study section for the Center for Scientific Review of NIH for 2013-2019.

Pamela Keel – Facebook and Eating Disorders

Facebook provides a fun way to stay connected with friends, but it also presents women with a new medium in which they are confronted by a thin ideal that impacts their risk for eating disorders.

These disorders represent serious forms of mental illness, and prior research established that girls who spent more time on Facebook experienced higher levels of body image concerns and were more likely to engage in eating disorder behaviors. However, it was unclear what was driving this association: It could have been that girls with greater concerns were more drawn to the site or that time on the site reinforced those concerns.

To better understand this association, we conducted two studies in college women. The first found that more time on Facebook was associated with higher levels of disordered eating.

The second study found that spending time on Facebook actually influenced eating disorder risk by reinforcing weight and shape concerns and anxiety. We also found the highest levels of disordered eating in women who placed greater importance on receiving comments and “likes” on their status updates, comments on their photos, and spent more time comparing their photos to photos of their friends.

Importantly, the flip side of these findings is that women who were least likely to compare their photos to those of their friends had the lowest eating problems, meaning that how Facebook is used matters. Social media sites have the potential to engage women to protect one another from eating disorders by employing peers to encourage healthy attitudes towards eating and weight.

Understanding how Facebook use influences women gives us an opportunity to change the content of posted images and peer interactions to reduce pressures girls and women face to be thin in order to feel “liked” and accepted.

Read More: Do you “like” my photo? Facebook use maintains eating disorder risk