Psychological, Physiological, and Behavioral Effects of Weight Stigma

描述（由申请人提供）：肥胖是一种“全球流行病”，影响所有年龄和社会经济水平的人。超重或肥胖使人们面临严重健康问题的风险。这也使他们在广泛的各个领域遭受严重的污名化和歧视。经历种族和民族歧视与较差的心理和身体健康有关，包括心血管疾病、高血压、血压反应性和抑郁症。然而，经历基于体重的污名化（WS）对健康的影响在很大程度上被忽视了。拟议的研究解决了心理，行为和生物学上的影响超重的男性和女性的经历或预期的WS。我们认为，WS是有压力的，并引发了一系列的负面情绪，认知和生物反应，可能会损害身心健康。我们还提出，经历或预期WS通过激活导致超重或认为自己超重的人体重增加的过程来损害健康。这些包括增加与压力有关的饮食和减少对调节饮食和锻炼至关重要的自我控制能力。我们建议，WS也增加了动机和意图，以避免通过减肥的耻辱，同时通过上述过程降低这样做的能力。这进一步加剧了威胁，并可能导致超重者从事对健康有负面影响的耻辱回避行为，例如避免锻炼，或从事不健康的减肥行为。 我们提出了四个实验来验证这些假设。我们的目的是证明，对于超重的个人，社会环境激活了对WS的关注，包括暴露于有关肥胖流行病的公共卫生信息：1）压力大，表现为血压升高、皮质醇反应性、情绪和激活的刻板印象，2）自我调节能力下降，这表现在需要自我控制的认知任务表现较差，以及超重的人抵抗食用增肥食物的能力降低，（3）增加通过尝试减肥来避免耻辱的动机和意图，同时降低个体这样做的能力，从而导致不健康的饮食行为和避免锻炼。我们还建议测试上述影响的三个潜在的主持人，以及这些影响的几个介质。此外，我们还将研究饮食对WS的下游影响。总的来说，这些实验将更好地了解体重污名的心理、生理和行为影响，包括心血管疾病、抑郁和体重增加的风险增加，以及如何减轻这些影响。研究结果具有巨大的潜力，照亮心理过程，可能有助于，并有可能减少，肥胖，并将有影响的公共运动，以减少肥胖流行病的设计。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Obesity is a "global epidemic," affecting people of all ages and socioeconomic levels. Being overweight or obese puts people at risk for serious health problems. It also exposes them to profound stigmatization and discrimination across a wide variety of domains. Experiencing racial and ethnic discrimination has been linked to poorer mental and physical health, including cardiovascular disease, hypertension, blood pressure reactivity, and depression. The effects of experiencing weight-based stigmatization (WS) on health, however, have been largely ignored. The proposed research addresses the psychological, behavioral, and biological effects on overweight men and women of experiencing or anticipating WS. We propose that WS is stressful and triggers a cascade of negative emotions, cognitions and biological responses that can damage mental and physical health. We also propose that experiencing or anticipating WS impairs health by activating processes that contribute to weight gain among those who are or perceive themselves to be overweight. These include increasing stress-related eating and reducing self-control capacity essential for regulating diet and exercise. We propose that WS also increases motivation and intentions to avoid stigma by losing weight while simultaneously decreasing the capacity to do so via the processes described above. This further exacerbates threat and can lead the overweight to engage in stigma-avoidance behaviors with negative health implications, such as avoiding exercise, or engaging in unhealthy behaviors to lose weight. We propose to conduct 4 experiments to test these hypotheses. Our aims are to demonstrate that for individuals who are overweight, social contexts that activate concerns about WS, including exposure to public health messages about the obesity epidemic: 1) are stressful, as indexed by increased blood pressure, cortisol reactivity, emotions, and activated stereotypes, 2) decrease self-regulatory capacity, as indexed by poorer performance on cognitive tasks requiring self-control and by reduced capacity of people who are overweight to resist consuming fattening food, and 3) increase motivation and intention to avoid stigma by attempting to lose weight, while decreasing individuals' capacity to do so, thus contributing to unhealthy eating behaviors and avoidance of exercise. We also propose to test three potential moderators of the above effects as well as several mediators of these effects. In addition, we will examine the downstream consequences of eating in response to WS. Collectively, these experiments will provide a better understanding of the psychological, physiological, and behavioral effects of weight stigma, including increased risk for cardiovascular disease, depression, and weight gain, and how these effects may be mitigated. Findings hold enormous potential to illuminate psychological processes that may contribute to, and potentially reduce, obesity and will have implications for the design of public campaigns to reduce the obesity epidemic.