"What can her body do?" Reducing weight stigma by appreciating another person's body functionality.

OBJECTIVE: Weight stigma is prevalent across multiple life domains, and negatively affects both psychological and physical health. Yet, research into weight stigma reduction techniques is limited, and rarely results in reduced antipathy toward higher-weight individuals. The current pre-registered study investigated a novel weight stigma reduction intervention. We tested whether a writing exercise focusing on body functionality (i.e., everything the body can do, rather than how it looks) of another person leads to reductions in weight stigma. METHOD: Participants were 98 women (Mage = 23.17, Range = 16-63) who viewed a photograph of a higher-weight woman, "Anne," and were randomised to complete a writing exercise either describing what "Anne's" body could do (experimental group) or describing her home (active control group). Facets of weight stigma were assessed at pretest and posttest. RESULTS: At posttest, the experimental group evidenced higher fat acceptance and social closeness to "Anne" compared with the active control group. However, no group differences were found in attribution complexity, responsibility, and likeability of "Anne". CONCLUSIONS: A brief body functionality intervention effectively reduced some, but not all, facets of weight stigma in women. This study provides evidence that functionality-focused interventions may hold promise as a means to reduce weight stigma.

The role of genetic and environmental factors in covariation between anxiety and anger in childhood.

Higher levels of anger expression, as well as lower levels of anger control, have been reported for adults with anxiety disorders compared to individuals without anxiety disorders. Different to the research on adults, very few studies examined the relationship between anxiety and anger in childhood. In our study, we investigated 398 Italian twin pairs (74 MZ male, 70 MZ female, 134 same-sex dizygotic-53 male, 81 female-, and 120 unlike-sex dizygotic twin pairs), aged 8-17 (mean 13.06 ± 2.59): (i) the heritability of a childhood anger phenotype; (ii) the association between five anxiety domains and anger; (iii) the role of possible common etiological factors in explaining the observed comorbidity and overlap in the risk between anxiety phenotypes and anger. The study demonstrated that anger, assessed by CBCL items, is heritable in children at a similar rate to prior studies (40%). Our research found low to moderate rate of correlation between anger and anxiety (from 0.10 to 0.19). Finally, the present study found that the majority of etiological influences on anxiety and anger are independent of each other. Data showed that shared environmental influences have some small effects on the phenotypic covariation between the anxiety phenotypes and anger (12%); whereas unique environmental influences have an almost negligible effect (1%). Our analyses did not reveal the effect of genetic effects in explaining the covariation between these phenotypes.