Dropping the weight stigma: nostalgia improves attitudes toward persons who are overweight

By Rhiannon N. Turner, T. Wildschut, Constantine Sedikides. 2012

117 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Weight stigma, a negative attitude toward persons who are overweight, can lead to emotional detriment (increased vulnerability to depression and anxiety, decreased self-esteem) and discriminatory practices (denial of employment, lower wages, refusal of job promotion or college admission, healthcare deprivation), which have increased dramatically in the United States over the past decade. We report two experiments that implicate nostalgia as a resource or strategy for weight stigma reduction. We hypothesized and found that nostalgia about an encounter with a person who is overweight improves attitudes toward the group “overweight.” Undergraduates who recalled a nostalgic (vs. ordinary) interaction with an overweight person subsequently showed more positive outgroup attitudes. The effect of nostalgia on outgroup attitudes was mediated by greater inclusion of the outgroup in the self and increased outgroup trust (Experiments 1 and 2), as well as reduced intergroup anxiety and greater perceptions of a common ingroup identity (Experiment 2). The findings have interventional potential.

Subfields: Literature and Literary Theory, Pharmacy, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1cd6dad6910aa17fdbc68ab2a48be522701732cc

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In Literature and Literary Theory

In Pharmacy

In Social Psychology

Citations in the corpus

The sociality of personal and collective nostalgia (2019, background): “Finally, all participants responded to an ingroup-oriented action tendency measure (after Turner et al., 2012) consisting of three items measuring approach-orientation toward student peers (“I want to talk to them,” “spend time with them,” “find out more about them”) and three items measuring…”