Journal of Advanced Research in Social Sciences ISSN 2538-919X ______________________________ * Corresponding Author E-Mail Address: sandor.alexandra.valeria@gmail.com © The Author(s). 2020 Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The Psychosocial Impact of Modifying Face and Body Photographs in Social Media Alexandra Valéria Sándor Eötvös Loránd University, Faculty of Social Sciences, Doctoral School of Sociology, Hungary ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT Keywords: Body Image Image Alteration Mental Health Social Psychology Sociology Social media usage has become widespread in the past decade, and studying its far-reaching impacts requires an interdisciplinary approach. This pilot study takes the first step in discovering the psychosocial impact of specific media content, modified face and body photographs, and the act of modifying in this context with a mixed-method assessment. The analysis is based on structured interviews with ten social media users with various demographic traits (such as gender, age, or education) who were presented eight pairs of "before-and-after modification" photographs and completed the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) to assess a possible relationship between modified face and body photographs in social media and depression. All the participants encountered such face and body photographs that they considered "modified". The definition of modification was "retouching, editing, using filters or any kind of digital altering mechanism". Seventy per cent of users admitted that they took the opportunity to modify photographs of their face and body. The average Beck score of the image modifiers was 7.14, while non-modifiers' was 2.33. Thirty per cent of the interviewees probably had mild depression or were in a mildly depressive state during the data collection based on their Beck scores; all were image modifiers exposed to modified pictures. Besides the fully structured interviews with social media users, half-structured interviews were also recorded with four experts – a social psychologist, a clinical psychologist, a plastic surgeon, and a professional photographer – to gain a deeper understanding of this complex topic and contribute to further, more extensive research on this area. 1. Introduction Social media social media has its own logic, which includes special norms, strategies and mechanisms (van Dijck & Poell, 2013). On social media, one can see virtual self- representations that are influenced by ‘real-life’ individual and societal changes (Hogan & Quan-Haase, 2010 and Sándor, 2020). Research examining the various patterns, reasons, and effects of social media usage is ubiquitous. Certain things are now universally recognised. For example, friends' pictures on social media have the biggest impact on women’s body image (Hogue & Mills, 2019). Facebook usage was also associated with body image concerns in young women (Fardouly & Vartanian, 2015). However, ethical questions about photo modification in the media arose long before social media became part of everyday life (Wheeler & Gleason, 2010). The penetration of social media usage is so vast that the largest platform, Facebook, had 2.45 billion active monthly users as of the third quarter of 2019 (Clement, 2019). It is also known that users' mental states can be detected by traces left behind on Facebook