The Cognitive Tax of Self-Objectification Examining Sexually Objectifying Music Videos and Female Emerging Adults' Cognitive Processing of Subsequent Advertising

Objectification theory (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997, Psychology of Women Quarterly, 21, 173-206) posits that a consequence of living in a sexually objectifying culture is self-objectification, a cognitively taxing preoccupation with one's appearance. The present study investigated the effects of exposure to sexual objectification of female artists in music videos, on female emerging adults' self-objectification and their ability to cognitively process subsequent television commercials. Results indicated that exposure to music videos high in sexual objectification induced self-objectification and hindered participants' subsequent performance in encoding visual information from commercials, but did not diminish participants' ability to allocate resources to, or to recall factual information from, the commercials.