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Description: Worldwide, one of the most serious public health concerns in the twenty-first century is childhood obesity, with prevalence rates having increased more than tenfold in the previous four decades. Research demonstrates, however, that both parents and healthcare professionals misperceive children's body weight/size and are very poor at categorising children as overweight or very overweight. A technique that could improve discrete weight categorisations is the Method of Adjustment (MoA) task that has been used in previous body image research and allows the participant to systematically change the CGI model size and shape smoothly, in real-time. This has been shown to remove the influence of contraction bias, which is a visual bias when judging body size meaning that body size judgments are expected to be most accurate when comparing a body similar in size to the reference and increasingly less accurate as the two diverge. Instead of asking participants to discretely categorise the 3D child bodies into one of four NCMP weight categories (underweight, healthy weight, overweight, extremely overweight), the current study, therefore, aims to use the MoA task to assess where adults judge a childs weight to be, eliminating the impact of contraction bias. We acknowledge, however, that obesity is a highly stigmatised condition and that even brief exposure to body-related words can induce negative affective responses and be harmful to both psychological well-being and physical health. Although participants may be able to discriminate between the body sizes of children, they are however much less accurate at applying labels through categorisation tasks, suggesting an awareness of the negative effects of such labels. This study therefore also aims to compare the accuracy of weight status judgments when language is more positively framed towards taking action rather than using body-related words such as overweight and obese which can be stigmatising. Beyond asking participants to categorise children's weight status, we will also have a third condition that asks participants where they judge the boundaries between each weight category to be for each stimulus set (i.e. boundary between underweight and healthy weight). Previously, we have collected data for a replication of this study that uses less realistic stimuli that represent accurate changes in body shape and size using silver-skinned figures. This study, therefore, aims to compare how performance differences on the three tasks when using stimuli that have been rendered in Daz studio and therefore look more photorealistic and life-like.

License: CC-By Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

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