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Demographic Characteristics.
Source publication
Objective:
Higher body-weight people are highly stigmatized and face prejudice and discrimination across a number of domains. Further, experiences of weight stigmatization are associated with a host of negative physical, psychological, and social consequences. However, less is known about effective means for reducing weight bias. One strategy that...
Context in source publication
Citations
... After validating the scenario reading, they completed all the questionnaires. Based on the protocol of Dunaev et al. (2018), we inserted an instructional manipulation check (i. e., "to verify that you are reading all the questions correctly, please answer 'strongly disagree' to this question") in the middle of the questionnaire. ...
... For example, it has been found that imagined contact is especially effective at improving outgroup attitudes among prejudiced individuals [27,28]. Among the characteristics of the imagined contact task, there is evidence that imagined contact effects might be boosted, for example, by instructions aimed at increasing elaboration [22], by counter-stereotypical characteristics of the outgroup member [29], and by imagining the physical touching of hands [30]. ...
To reduce prejudice and to promote intergroup harmony and equality, the imagined intergroup contact technique, based on the mental simulation of an encounter with an outgroup member, has been proposed. Though a substantial body of research has provided support for the efficacy of imagined intergroup contact in prejudice reduction, an alternative strand of research has raised questions about its effectiveness. In this experiment, we combined imagined intergroup contact with cultural humility, that is, an other-oriented, humble approach toward people with different cultural backgrounds, recognizing status and power imbalances and privileges. Specifically, we tested whether instructions aimed at eliciting cultural humility during imagined contact boosted its effectiveness in reducing prejudice and promoting future contact intentions, compared to a standard imagined contact condition and to a control imagination task. Intergroup anxiety was tested as a mediator of the effects of culturally humble imagined contact on reduced prejudice and on future contact intentions. We found that culturally humble imagined contact, compared to the two other conditions, reduced intergroup anxiety and yielded indirect effects on reduced prejudice and increased future contact intentions. The findings will be discussed by focusing on the integration of cultural humility in prejudice reduction techniques based on intergroup contact.
... Efforts have been made to address weight stigma attitudes using a variety of approaches including counterstereotypic imagined intergroup contact, cognitive dissonance, empathy and perspective-taking, didactic educational, and reflective journaling interventions (Alleva et al., 2021;Breithaupt et al., 2020;Brochu, 2023;Cardel et al., 2022;Dunaev et al., 2018;Fox et al., 2023;Gloor & Puhl, 2016;Lessard & Puhl, 2021;Oliver, Shenkman, Diewald, Dowdell, 2021;Oliver, Shenkman, Diewald, Smeltzer, 2021;Rote et al., 2018;Wijayatunga et al., 2019). In these interventions, it is important to note that most target challenging fatphobia in health care students, providers, and educators rather than addressing internalized weight stigma among those who have lived experience of higher weight. ...
... In these interventions, it is important to note that most target challenging fatphobia in health care students, providers, and educators rather than addressing internalized weight stigma among those who have lived experience of higher weight. There are several recent promising interventions, however, that target internalized weight stigma in large-bodied individuals with disordered eating (Brownstone et al., 2021;Dunaev et al., 2018;Mensinger, 2022). To further enhance these emerging interventions, clinicians must understand how large-bodied clients make sense of and heal from their experiences with weight stigma to support the development of these interventions for largebodied individuals. ...
Discrimination against and negative beliefs about large-bodied individuals, known as weight stigma, is pervasive and harmful. While previous research has focused on the negative consequences of weight stigma, the present study aims to highlight the lived experience of large-bodied individuals while also exploring the process of healing from harmful experiences of weight stigma. Ten adult (9/10 White, 8/10 cisgender women), large-bodied individuals recruited via snowball sampling through a nonprofit, grassroots, eating disorder advocacy organization participated in a 10-week, counselor-facilitated support group with the shared goal of healing from the impact of weight stigma. Researchers used reflexive thematic analysis to analyze video recordings and transcripts of group sessions to answer the following question: how did participants make sense of their weight stigma experiences and engage with the process of healing in community? Four primary themes were generated: (a) Community is Essential, (b) Storying, (c) Deprogramming and Changing Mindset, and (d) Expansive Healing. These results underscore the impact of weight stigma in the lives of large-bodied individuals and provide insight into how clinicians might support such individuals engaging in collective healing from these painful experiences.
... For example, using E-contact, Alvídrez et al. (2015) found an extremely atypical Ecuadorian exemplar to be rated as more attractive and less typical than a typical Ecuadorian exemplar, with interpersonal attraction and perceived typicality being positively and negatively associated with perceptions of Ecuadorians as a whole, respectively. Dunaev et al. (2018) found imagined contact with an extremely atypical obese person improved participants' perceptions of obese people compared to participants who imagined contact with a typical obese person or who imagined a Caribbean vacation. Similarly, in three studies, Yetkili et al. (2018) found imagined contact with an atypical immigration officer, economics student, or Muslim, improved perceptions of the exemplar and their group compared to imagined contact with a typical exemplar and compared to control conditions. ...
... Indeed, a meta-analysis investigating the effect of imagined contact found it to have a significant beneficial effect on perceptions of a range of outgroups (Miles & Crisp, 2014), and it also been found to be effective at reducing public mental health stigma specifically . Exemplar typicality has been found to moderate the effectiveness of imagined contact at improving perceptions of other social groups, although whether typical (Stathi et al., 2011, Study 3) or atypical (Dunaev et al., 2018;Yetkili et al., 2018) exemplars are more effective is unclear. ...
... Similarly, that participants in the atypical conditions reported lower stereotyping and discriminatory intentions compared to the control condition is consistent with some contact research and with results in the impression formation domain (e.g., Dunaev et al., 2018;McIntyre et al., 2016), but is not consistent with claims that only contact with typical exemplars will improve perceptions (Lewin & Grabbe, 1945). This comparison was more reliable than that involving the typical condition, but there was also no significant difference in stigma between the typical and atypical conditions, suggesting that exemplar typicality may not influence the effect of contact in the same way it appears to in impression formation studies. ...
A large number of studies support the effectiveness of interventions aimed at reducing public stigma, which has numerous deleterious effects on the lives of people with mental illness. Missing from research literature, however, is an examination of intervention characteristics which may enhance their effectiveness. Drawing from the broader literature concerned with changing perceptions of social outgroups, the present research program explores the role of exemplar typicality—the degree to which the characteristics of outgroup members who participants read about or interact with adhere to stereotypes about their group. Scholars have arrived at divergent conclusions regarding the level of typicality that is the most beneficial, prompting experimentation into this issue. In three studies concerned with stigma against people with mental illness, participants read about ( n = 262) or had contact with (E‐contact, n = 248; imagined contact, n = 506) a typical, moderately atypical, or extremely atypical exemplar. Overall, the results suggested typical exemplars to be detrimental or less effective, while atypical exemplars appeared to produce lower public stigma. But there were inconsistent findings regarding the difference between the moderately and extremely atypical exemplars. These results call for intergroup contact scholars to reexamine the claim that typical exemplars are ideal, given their potential to aggravate biases toward some vulnerable social groups. The findings also suggest that organizations implementing prevalent interventions such as contact and personal narratives to reduce mental health stigma should carefully attend to the characteristics of the outgroup exemplars involved.
... greater desire to interact with overweight people in the future compared to those who imagined such an interaction. In another study (Dunaev et al., 2018), participants who imagined interaction with a counter-stereotypic "obese" person reported lower levels of weight bias than participants who imagined interacting with a stereotypical "obese" person or did an unrelated imagination task. ...
Weight stigma, a negative attitude toward the overweight, can lead to discriminatory practices, as well as increase overweight individuals' vulnerability to depression, anxiety, and low self‐esteem. We propose that a nostalgia induction can attenuate weight stigma. Participants identified an overweight individual, before writing about an interpersonal encounter with that individual, characterized by either central (e.g., “keepsakes” and “childhood”) or peripheral (e.g., “wishing” and “daydreaming”) features of the construct “nostalgia.” Participants who recalled a central (vs. peripheral) nostalgic encounter reported more positive feelings and beliefs toward overweight individuals in general. Moreover, nostalgia influenced behavior: Nostalgic (vs. control) participants reduced their social distance when anticipating an interaction with an overweight individual. The effect of nostalgia on all three outcomes (i.e., positive feelings, beliefs, and behavior) was mediated by greater social connectedness, which in turn was associated with higher inclusion of the outgroup in the self and increased outgroup trust.
... However, overweight is a complex condition that adds to a range of repercussions in psychosocial spheres. According to the literature, people with obesity are likely to suffer discrimination and social prejudice in their personal relations with the general public, in a professional context (Dunaev, Brochu, & Markey, 2018) and also within their family. Nowadays, it is worth mentioning that there seems to be only one possible type of body (the lean body), which leads to the understanding that society is experiencing a period of generalized "lipophobia", which is closely associated with the obsession with thinness and its consequent near insane rejection of obesity, thus dehumanizing the body. ...
Background:
Appropriate body image self-perceptions provide a good help to increase the feeling of personal well-being, thus having an important impact on health. Universities, having an important role in shaping of the future workers, represent an important setting to approach health issues.
Objective:
This study determined to what extent different types of students in higher education (four categories of students were created: "self-secure", "perfect", "destructive" and "apologetic") are likely to adopt different health risk behaviors.
Methods:
A cross-sectional study in a sample of students from five European Universities in the 2016/2017 academic year was conducted. Based on the combination of body image perception and body mass index, four types of students were identified: "self-secure" (overweight students with a good self-esteem); "perfect" (underweight students with a good self-esteem); "destructive" (overweight students with a poor self-esteem); "apologetic" (underweight students with a poor self-esteem).
Results:
The study reveals that the defined types of students differed in terms of risk behavior. When the control was included, the "self-secure" student type had a reduced likelihood of being on a diet (22.3%) and physically active (17.8%) than other students (p < 0.001).
Conclusions:
The results of this paper raise concerns about the future because the body dissatisfaction of the college student could be a big impact in long term whether at collective, personally or even professionally.
... As the instrument was theoretically informed by qualitative interviews on experiences of everyday racism among Black Americans, and developed within a study context aiming to capture race-related discrimination, there is currently no psychometric evidence strongly supporting a conceptual fit between the EDS and experiences of other forms of discrimination. For example, people with large body size are frequently stereotyped as lacking in confidence and 'weak' (Dunaev, Brochu, & Markey, 2018). As such, 'fat' people are less likely to experience being treated as though they are dishonest, but perhaps more likely to be treated with less respect, or experience a myriad of other forms of unfair treatment not captured in the EDS (Thomas, Hyde, Karunaratne, Herbert, & Komesaroff, 2008). ...
The Everyday Discrimination Scale (EDS) is one of the most widely used measures of discrimination in health research, and has been useful for capturing the impact of discrimination on health. However, psychometric analysis of this measure has been predominantly among Black Americans, with limited examination of its effectiveness in capturing discrimination against other social groups. This paper explores the theoretical and historical foundations of the EDS, and draws on the analytic framework of Messick’s theory of unified validity to examine the effectiveness of the EDS in capturing diverse experiences of discrimination. Encompassing both social consequences and value implications, Messick’s unified validity contends that psychometric evaluation alone is insufficient to justify instrument use or ensure social resonance of findings. We argue that despite the robust psychometric properties and utility in addressing anti-Black race-related discrimination, the theoretical foundations and research use of the EDS have yet to respond to current discrimination theory, particularly intersectionality. This paper concludes with guidance for researchers in using the EDS in health research across diverse populations, including in data collection, analysis, and presentation of findings.
... 4 Recognizing the limits of attribution theory-based interventions, some researchers have turned to empathy as a potential way to reduce weight stigma. In empathy-based interventions, researchers ask participants to "put themselves in a fat person's shoes" through techniques such as exposure to first-person narratives (Swift et al., 2013), roleplaying (Matharu et al., 2014), imagination (Dunaev et al., 2018), and experience simulation (Herrmann-Werner et al., 2019;Kushner et al., 2014). Despite their varied methods, empathy-based interventions have been generally ineffective at reducing weight stigma. ...
Stigma against fat people permeates every level of healthcare, yet most attempts to reduce weight stigma among healthcare providers have shown only marginal results. Fat studies, a field that rigorously interrogates negative assumptions about fatness, can help social psychologists understand weight stigma by centering the pathologization of fatness as a major contributor to weight stigma at the structural and interpersonal level. A fat studies approach also reorients the normative goal of weight stigma interventions from reducing stigma to eradicating stigma and calls for methods that reject weight stigma’s roots in medicine and medical discourse. Even nuanced and sympathetic models of “obesity” cannot combat stigma that is structurally based in medical authority. We applied these principles to develop a new method of weight stigma intervention: direct contact structured through narrative medicine. In a qualitative pilot study, four medical students and two fat activist community members met for five 2‐hours narrative medicine workshops over 5 weeks. All participants completed focus group interviews about the experience. Interview transcript analysis revealed that these workshops provided a space for depathologizing, humanizing, empathy‐inducing, and power‐leveling interactions between medical students and fat people, where members of both groups reported benefiting from the experience. We conclude that non‐pathologizing approaches to eradicating weight stigma are not only feasible, but both ethically and methodologically necessary.
... However, overweight is a complex condition that adds to a range of repercussions in psychosocial spheres. According to the literature, people with obesity are likely to suffer discrimination and social prejudice in their personal relations with the general public, in a professional context (Dunaev, Brochu, & Markey, 2018) and also within their family. Nowadays, it is worth mentioning that there seems to be only one possible type of body (the lean body), which leads to the understanding that society is experiencing a period of generalized "lipophobia", which is closely associated with the obsession with thinness and its consequent near insane rejection of obesity, thus dehumanizing the body. ...
In order to investigate the impact of parental socioeconomic background on university students’ body image and social attachment, in this article we explore to what extent this relation is reinforced or modified by a third variable: overweight and obesity. For this purpose, the study draws on a cross-sectional data set (n = 980) of university students from Denmark, Germany, Portugal, Croatia and the Czech Republic. Based on the combination of the Body Esteem Scale (BES) and the Attachment Style Scale (WASQ), we created four types of students: “double jeopardy students”, “well-balanced students”, “nurturing solitude students” and “social mirroring students”. We used a simple linear probability model and regression analyses to test our hypothesis. We found that more than half of the “double jeopardy” (53%) and “social mirroring” (60%) students have low-income parents, and the overweight problem cut across these two groups of undergraduates. The students that scored highest on the overall mental well-being scale were the “well-balanced” students. The impact of parental socioeconomic background on body image and social attachment style between fields of studies is similar to that between “double jeopardy” or “well-balanced” students, regardless of whether they belong to the humanities and social sciences or natural and technical sciences. Our results indicate that high parental income increased resistance to poor body image and social attachment, and students who are overweight and/or obese are more likely to have poor body image and social attachment.
... These interventions included those that addressed weight controllability attributions, empathy and acceptance, social consensus, and incorporated other strategies (e.g., cognitive dissonance). Since these publications, some recent interventions have shown success in reducing weight bias via counterstereotypic imagined intergroup contact (Dunaev et al., 2018), psychological causal attributions (Khan et al., 2018), non-stigmatizing visual portrayals (Brochu et al., 2014), and direct intergroup contact (Koball and Carels, 2015), whereas others have produced null effects (e.g., Koball and Carels, 2015;Gloor and Puhl, 2016). Perhaps because weight bias is so strong, widespread, and often perceived to be socially acceptable, interventions that are designed to directly challenge negative weight attitudes and beliefs may arouse resistance and thus be limited in their effectiveness (Monteith et al., 1994). ...
Compared to many other forms of social bias, weight bias is pervasive, socially accepted, and difficult to attenuate. According to the common ingroup identity model, strategies that expand group inclusiveness may promote more positive intergroup attitudes and behaviors, particularly when people are aware of unjust treatment of others included within their shared identity. Considering that most people are not aware of the social justice issue of weight discrimination, we hypothesized that a common ingroup identity would be effective in reducing weight bias primarily when unfair weight-based treatment was made salient (i.e., that fat people experience discrimination in employment). Participants were randomly assigned to conditions following a 3 (discrimination salience: weight discrimination, height discrimination, control) × 2 (group identity: common ingroup, control) design and completed an evaluative measure of weight bias. Results revealed a significant interaction, showing that when weight discrimination was salient, participants in the common ingroup identity condition reported less weight bias than participants in the group identity control condition. When a common ingroup identity was emphasized, weight bias was lower when weight discrimination was salient compared to when height discrimination was salient and the control condition in which nothing about discrimination was mentioned. These results were not moderated by participant weight. This study demonstrates that a common ingroup identity can be effective in reducing weight bias if a cue is provided that fat people experience disparate and unjust outcomes in employment. Given the serious consequences of weight bias for health and well-being, and the relative ease of implementing this prejudice-reduction intervention, the common ingroup identity model has potential application for reducing weight bias in a range of real-world settings. However, these findings should be considered preliminary until they are replicated in well-powered and pre-registered future research.
