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 Study participants who were shown images of heavy and thin
individuals while sniffing odorless substances rated the “scent
samples” as smelling worse when they were paired with images of
heavy people.
“Our findings suggest that people may hold negative views of heavy
individuals that are sufficiently entrenched that they can cross
over into olfactory (that is, smell) perceptions though people may
not be aware that they hold such views,” senior author Andrew Ward
told Reuters Health in an email.
“This is the first study to show that negative bias toward heavy
individuals is sufficient to affect smell perception,” said Ward, a
psychology researcher at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania.
As reported in the International Journal of Obesity, Ward and his
colleagues enrolled college students in two separate studies. In the
first, 67 participants were shown twelve separate images – four
heavy people, four thin people and four pictures of inanimate
objects (the “distractor images”).
While the participants viewed each image, a researcher placed the
odorless sample under their noses.
Participants rated the “scents” paired with pictures of heavy people
as lower than samples paired with thin pictures. But the findings
weren’t completely clear due to the arrangement of the images, so
the researchers repeated the study with additional distractor
images. A total of 175 college students participated.
Once again, the odorless samples paired with images of heavy
individuals were rated as smelling worse than those paired with
images of thin people. And that effect was most pronounced among
study participants who were themselves heavy.
The extent of negative bias toward overweight individuals may be
greater than previously assumed, the authors say.
“Given how pervasive the bias might be, I think it’s important to
make people aware of it, especially to the extent that individuals
might not otherwise be able to explicitly recognize the bias in
themselves,” Ward said.
Angela Meadows, a psychology researcher at the University of
Birmingham in the UK who was not involved in the study, said the
extent of negative bias toward heavier individuals is pretty well
established.
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“They experience stigma and discrimination in just about every
aspect of daily life - including healthcare, education, legal
proceedings, personal relationships - even going shopping is fraught
with potential and actual negative experiences,” Meadows told
Reuters Health in an email.
“The world is not a friendly place for fat individuals,” said
Meadows.
Meadows said most scientific attempts at improving the situation
haven't been very successful.
“Public health messages and the 'War on Obesity' aren't helping
because they frame the fat individual as the villain, and media
representations of fat people are almost entirely negative," she
said.
When this stigma is pointed out, Meadows added, people often respond
by saying that if fat people don't like being treated badly, they
should lose weight.
“Fat is one of the few stigmatized groups who are expected to change
themselves in response to being bullied and harassed,” she pointed
out.
Meadows said the current study adds to previous evidence showing how
much heavier people dislike their bodies.
“Common wisdom suggests that this could motivate them to change, but
almost all the evidence points the other way,” she said.
“Self-stigma is associated with more binge eating, less frequent
exercise, and so on.”
Meadows said that more and more, research is showing that a positive
body image is associated with more healthy behaviors, and better
health and well being, even at larger body sizes.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1Hukkhj International Journal of Obesity,
online February 4, 2015.
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