The Impact of Applicants’ Weight and Education About Obesity on Applicant Ratings

A systematic review of implicit attitudes and their neural correlates in eating behaviour

“…An ethics educational training partially improved attitudes towards obesity ( Geller and Watkins, 2018 ), whereas Russell-Mayhew et al (2015) showed a reduction of both implicit and explicit weight bias after performing an interactive professional workshop and O’Brien et al (2010) demonstrated that it was possible to reduce or exacerbate both anti-fat explicit and implicit attitudes, depending on the information provided about causes of obesity. In contrast, Scrivano et al (2017) found that informing about the causes of obesity had an impact only on the explicit beliefs about the controllability of obesity. In a research that involved an interactive computer game, the Cyberball game, Pryor et al (2013) focused on the social influence on behavioural expression of weight bias, proving that both explicit and implicit anti-fat attitudes influenced interactions with an overweight player, but only when other players ostracized the overweight subject.…”

“…Moreover, since weight bias has been found even among medical students ( Miller et al , 2013 ; Phelan et al , 2014 , 2015b ; Baker et al , 2017 ) and within the healthcare setting ( Teachman and brownell, 2001 ; Schwartz et al , 2003 ; Vallis et al , 2007 ; Sabin et al , 2012 ; Tomiyama et al , 2015 ; Aweidah et al , 2016 ; Halvorson et al , 2019 ), the possibility that the quality of patient’s care can be negatively affected, leading people with overweight and obesity to avoid preventive healthcare, should be taken into account. Due to the potential negative implications of weight bias, some researches tried to verify the effects of different manipulations aimed to improve weight stigma ( Geier et al , 2003 ; Teachman et al , 2003 ; Gapinski et al , 2006 ; O’Brien et al , 2010 ; Rukavina et al , 2010 ; Domoff et al , 2012 ; Flint et al , 2013 ; Swift et al , 2013 ; Russell-Mayhew et al , 2015 ; Hilbert and Meyre, 2016 ; Karsay and Schmuck, 2017; Rudolph and Hilbert, 2017 ; Scrivano et al, 2017 ; Geller and Watkins, 2018 ; Wijayatunga et al , 2019 ), providing mixed results, but leading hopes about the possibility that negative attitudes towards fatness can be minimized ( Teachman et al , 2003 ; O’Brien et al , 2010 ; Russell-Mayhew et al , 2015 ; Hilbert and Meyre, 2016 ). A prospective research focusing on medical students ( Phelan et al , 2015b ) found evidence for changes in weight bias, fostered by school training and interactions with patients with obesity, suggesting that curricula and lecturers should be shaped, taking into consideration such mediating variables, in order to improve weight-related attitudes of future professionals.…”