Psychobiological Processes in Social Evaluation

Higher-weight individuals face pervasive weight-related stigma and discrimination in their daily lives. There is conceptual and empirical evidence to suggest that weight stigma contributes to worse physical and psychological health outcomes, mediated by the deleterious psychobiological responses to psychosocial stress. Activating self-soothing emotional states (such as self-compassion) may protect against this psychobiological cascade, conferring resilience to negative social evaluation (such as weight stigma). This proof-of-concept study aims to establish the feasibility of an experimental protocol testing whether an acute self-compassion intervention can attenuate the psychobiological stress response to induced weight-based social-evaluative threat. Participants will be randomized into either self-compassion intervention or rest control groups. A standard body composition assessment will be used to induce weight stigma among young women who self-identify as "higher-weight." Stress-sensitive biomarkers (i.e., salivary cortisol and heart-rate variability) along with psychological indices of self-conscious emotions will be used to quantify the psychobiological stress response. This novel pilot study will contribute to efforts to understand the psychobiological processes by which self-compassion facilitates adaptive responding to acute stress, and will help inform future tests of interventions focused on mitigating the harmful health effects of social stigma.