Congratulations Dr. Bruno Staffelbach

Hearty congratulations to Dr. Bruno Staffelbach, my professor, advisor, and the newly appointed President of the University of Lucerne!

Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management

I attended the the 75th Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management held August 7-11, 2015 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

The program theme was Opening Governance. The 2015 theme invites members to consider opportunities to improve the effectiveness and creativity of organizations by restructuring systems at the highest organizational levels, and to try to answer the many questions organizational governance faces in today's digital and informational climate.

Together with colleagues from Germany (Aline Hernandez Bark, Goethe), Switzerland (Levke Henningsen, UZH psychology), and the United States (Avina Gupta, NYU), we also presented a symposium on gender and leadership with our stellar discussant from Yale Business School, Professor Victoria Brescoll (see below). I also presented a paper coauthored with Tyler Okimoto, Anja Feierabend, and Bruno Staffelbach on Young women are risky business? The “Maybe Baby” effect in employment decisions. 

Pictured left to right: Dr. Alina Hernandez Bark (Goethe Institute), Jamie Gloor, Professor Tori Brescoll (Yale University), Levke Henningsen (UZH) and Dr. Avina Gupta (Deloitte Consulting).

The Stigma of Disease and Disability

A chapter featuring Rebecca Puhl (Yale) and my obesity stigma research was just published In Corrigan's edited issue The Stigma of Disease and Disability published by the American Psychological Association. 

Feeling Bullied by Parents About Weight

Rudd Center research published in New York Times Well Blog post by Harriet Brown: Feeling Bullied by Parents About Weight. Read Full Article Here. 

“There still remains the widespread perception that a little stigma can be a good thing, that it might motivate weight loss,” said Dr. Puhl, a clinical psychologist. (Medical doctors, too, fall prey to this misconception.) But research done at the Rudd Center and elsewhere has shown that even well-intentioned commentary from parents and other adults can trigger disordered eating, use of laxatives and other dangerous weight-control practices, and depression.

Campers at Camp Shane in Ferndale, N.Y., one of two camps for overweight children that participated in a study published in Pediatrics.Credit David Ettenberg

Allergies, extra weight tied to bullying

In another study, researchers from Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, found that almost two-thirds of 361 teens enrolled in weight-loss camps had been bullied due to their size.

That likelihood increased with weight, so that the heaviest kids had almost a 100 percent chance of being bullied, Rebecca Puhl and her colleagues found. Verbal teasing was the most common form of bullying, but more than half of bullied kids reported getting taunted online or through texts and emails as well.

Read full article here. 

How Sweet It Is!

Check out the new Rudd video released today coinciding with our new report on cereal marketing to kids:

Ever wonder how much sugar your child's cereal contains? The Rudd Center presents this quick video to answer the question, and pose one of our own. Check out "How Sweet It Is!" Research conducted by the Rudd Center shows that children will eat low-sugar cereals, and even when allowed to add sugar to the cereal, tend to add much less sugar than a sugar-sweetened children's cereal contains.

Annual Meeting of the Association for Psychological Science

Weight bias in education: Teachers’ and coaches’ attitudes, expectations, and responses to bullies. 

Peterson, J. L. (Chair) (2012). Weight Bias: Evidence across Multiple Domains and Comparison with other Stigmatized Groups. Symposium presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Psychological Science, Chicago, Illinois, USA.

Weight Stereotyping Research published in Glamour Magazine

Glamour commissioned an exclusive poll of more than 1,800 women ages 18 to 40, designed with guidance from Rebecca Puhl, Ph.D., director of research and weight stigma initiatives at Yale’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity. We asked respondents to imagine a woman whom they had never met and knew nothing about except that she was “overweight” or “thin”; they then had to choose from pairs of words, like ambitious or lazy, to describe her. They could select neither, but fewer than half did—a telling statistic, according to Puhl. “Weight,” she says, “is one of the last acceptable prejudices.”

Read the full article here. 

Don’t Call My Kid Fat! Parents Want Doctors to Talk About ‘Unhealthy Weight’

Rudd Center research published in article on Time Magazine website. 

With 2 million U.S. children classified as extremely obese, it’s impossible to ignore kids’ growing girth. But researchers at the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University are suggesting that there are better, more sensitive ways to discuss the issue with parents and children.

“Many people find the term ‘fat’ to be pejorative and judgmental,” says Rebecca Puhl, the study’s lead author and Rudd’s director of research. “A lot of the time, providers have positive intentions, but the language they use can be seen as blaming, accusatory and not helpful.”

Read full article here.