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 The study tested snap judgments made by youngsters ages 9 to 11
right after they’d seen pictures of children with varied body
shapes.
Participants were briefly shown pictures of older children who were
similar to each other in age, race and sex but of different weights.
Right after that, they briefly viewed images of meaningless fractals
and were asked to rate these abstract geometric patterns as “good”
or “bad.”
After seeing pictures of healthy weight children, the participants
gave 64 percent of the fractals a “good” rating, compared with just
59 percent of the fractals they saw after looking at overweight
children.
If the participants had no implicit weight bias, researchers would
expect them to rate half of the fractals “good” and the other half
“bad,” the study authors say. A difference in the proportion of
“good” ratings after pictures of healthy weight versus overweight
children, however, indicates implicit bias.
“What’s surprising here is that the bias is similar to that seen for
race, and shows us that even kids already have strong preferences
based on weight,” said lead study author Asheley Cockrell Skinner of
Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.
The children had to make their judgments in a hurry. They only saw
pictures of other children for 350 milliseconds, followed by an
image of a fractal for 200 milliseconds.
Each participant viewed eight pairs of images. Pictures showed
children engaged in a variety of activities like reading, running,
standing and studying. In the pictures, children wore similar
outfits and had similar facial expressions.
The difference in percentages of “good” fractal ratings - that is,
the degree of young participants’ implicit bias - depended on how
much the participants themselves weighed.
Overall, the implicit bias rate was 5.4 percent, researchers report
in Pediatrics. But among healthy-weight participants, the implicit
bias rate was 7.9 percent, compared with 1.4 percent for overweight
participants.
“It’s possible children with obesity have greater exposure to other
people, such as family members, who have obesity; (they) may be more
accepting of obesity; or healthy children may not see children with
obesity as `like them,’ which affects their preferences,” Skinner
said by email.
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Beyond its small size, other limitations of the study include its
group of mostly white, affluent participants recruited from a single
location, the authors note. This might mean the results would be
different in a more diverse group of children.
Still, the findings add to a growing body of evidence suggesting
that weight bias starts early, said Rebecca Pearl, a researcher at
the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania
who wasn’t involved in the study.
“Prior research has shown that children as young as preschool age
show preferences for thin versus overweight peers,” Pearl, who
wasn’t involved in the study, said by email.
Parents can influence this, however, said Dr. Anne McTiernan, of the
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.
“Parents should teach their children to be accepting of people of
all sizes,” McTiernan, who wasn’t involved in the study, said by
email. “They can also screen for images their children see on TV and
on the Internet.”
They should also lead by example, said Justin Ryder, a pediatrics
researcher at the University of Minnesota Medical School who wasn’t
involved in the study.
“Using terms like fat, unhealthy, lazy, bad, ugly, etc. in reference
to a person struggling with being overweight or obese is likely to
build a negative attitude toward that people of that body shape over
time,” Ryder said by email. “Parents likely do not realize their own
implicit bias toward persons who are overweight or obese, making
this a challenge.”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2t2NDdz Pediatrics, online June 23, 2017.
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