BACKGROUND: Weight stigma is the social devaluation and denigration of individuals because of their excess body weight, resulting in poorer physical and mental health and healthcare avoidance. Attribution Theory and Goffman\'s theory of spoiled identity provided a general overarching framework for understanding weight stigma experiences.
OBJECTIVE: Our purpose was to explore weight stigma experiences from a broad range of perspectives emphasizing identities typically excluded in the weight stigma literature.
METHODS: We conducted a qualitative descriptive study with data drawn from 73 substantive narrative comments from participants who responded to a larger survey.
RESULTS: Analysis developed five themes: Working on weight, Not being overweight, Lack of help and empathy, Exposure and embarrassment and Positive experiences. Individuals who would be clinically assessed as overweight, especially men, often did not identify with having a weight problem and found the framing of personal responsibility for weight empowering. Participants with larger body sizes more often attributed embarrassment and shame about weight to treatment in the clinical setting. Older participants were more likely to have positive experiences.
CONCLUSIONS: The findings suggest ongoing tension between the framing of weight as a personal responsibility as opposed to a multifactorial condition with many uncontrollable aspects. Gender, age and body size shaped respondent perspectives, with some young male respondents finding empowerment through perceived personal control of weight. The healthcare system perpetuates weight stigma through lack of adequate equipment and excessively weight-centric medical counselling. Recommending a healthy lifestyle to patients without support or personalized medical assessment may perpetuate weight stigma and associated detrimental health outcomes.
UNASSIGNED: Patients with obesity and overweight were integral to this study, providing comments for our qualitative analyses.

The United States is facing a drug overdose crisis, and stigma against people who use drugs is a major roadblock to implementing solutions. Despite the public health importance of understanding and mitigating substance use stigma, prior research has focused mainly on perceptions of individuals with substance use disorders and a limited set of demographic traits. This leaves critical gaps in our understanding of stigma against fentanyl overdose decedents, who represent a much broader group, including people who use substances recreationally. This study develops a more robust understanding of these attitudes through an experimental vignette survey fielded to a national sample of American adults (n = 1432). Respondents were shown two fictional fentanyl overdose obituaries where a complex suite of decedent characteristics-including demographic traits and contexts of substance use-were randomly varied in a conjoint design. Respondents then endorsed one of the two decedents for each of several attitudinal outcomes, including blameworthiness and support for various interventions, and justified their choices in an open-ended format. Results indicate that the public assesses victims of fentanyl overdose meritocratically, making judgments based on personal history and life experience rather than traditional race, class, and gender status beliefs. While certainly a signal of progress on some fronts, this meritocratic lens conflicts with the public health model of addressing the overdose crisis and exposes the alarming persistence of explicit stigma against people who use drugs.

This study examines how conversations between patients and clinicians about the causes of their health conditions relate to patient engagement in care. Leveraging cultural health capital (CHC) theory, we find that patient-physician discussions of health attributions are one mechanism to build patient understanding and activate engagement. We present a qualitative interpretive analysis of data collected in three phases with adult home health care patients: phone interviews (n = 28), field observations (n = 61), and semi-structured field interviews (n = 38). We find that engaging in discussions of causal health attributions with clinicians enables patients to overcome uncertainty, envision preventive actions, and engage in setting future goals. Such discussions must be supported by acknowledgement of the co-responsibility of individual factors and structural factors such as social determinants of health. These discussions are not easy to navigate but they can potentially help patients transition from a mindset of treating the disease (pathogenic approach) to an awareness of their available capabilities to improve health (salutogenic approach). This study contributes to research on attribution theory and cultural health capital theory by demonstrating how discussing causes for poor health can enable patients resolve doubts and accrue instrumental and symbolic resources that facilitate healing.

This review provided a comprehensive examination of various theories that attempt to explain hypnosis, focusing on the interplay between conscious and unconscious processes. We conducted a thorough analysis of key theories, from historical origins to recent models centered on cognition, social factors, and attributions. A central theme emerged: the critical role of the unconscious as a \"gatekeeper\" that modulates and guides the hypnotic experience. This notion appears in various forms across many theories, with the unconscious actively shaping and regulating the flow of information between conscious and unconscious realms during hypnosis. Understanding this dynamic interplay is crucial for comprehending the complex nature of hypnosis. The synthesized view of the unconscious as a \"gatekeeper\" offers a framework for integrating insights from diverse perspectives and highlights the centrality of unconscious processes in shaping hypnotic phenomena. Future research should further investigate the mechanisms of this unconscious \"gatekeeper\" role and its impact on hypnosis.

Seven preregistered experimental studies investigated a potential mediator (self-blame) and moderator (the perceived responsibility of the helper for the help recipient\'s behavior) of Weiner\'s attribution-emotion-action model. When participants considered a nonchild close other experiencing depression, higher perceived controllability was related to lower sympathy, which correlated with less willingness to provide support; however, among parents considering their child experiencing depression, perceived controllability was either positively associated with sympathy (study 1) or did not influence sympathy (study 2). Offering an explanation, studies 3a/3b indicated a significantly weaker relationship between controllability and responsibility attributions when the target of help was the participant\'s child. Study 4 investigated the underlying mechanism. Parents experienced self-blame when the cause was controllable, which lowered the association between controllability and responsibility attributions. Studies 5 and 6 revealed this pattern was not specific to the parent-child relationship but occurred whenever the potential helper felt responsible for the help recipient\'s behavior.

BACKGROUND: The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of online medical services. Although some researchers have investigated how numerical ratings affect consumer choice, limited studies have focused on the effect of negative reviews that most concern physicians.
OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to investigate how negative review features, including proportion (low/high), claim type (evaluative/factual), and physician response (absence/presence), influence consumers\' physician evaluation process under conditions in which a physician\'s overall rating is high.
METHODS: Using a 2×2×2 between-subject decision-controlled experiment, this study examined participants\' judgment on physicians with different textual reviews. Collected data were analyzed using the t test and partial least squares-structural equation modeling.
RESULTS: Negative reviews decreased consumers\' physician selection intention. The negative review proportion (β=-0.371, P<.001) and claim type (β=-0.343, P<.001) had a greater effect on consumers\' physician selection intention compared to the physician response (β=0.194, P<.001). A high negative review proportion, factual negative reviews, and the absence of a physician response significantly reduced consumers\' physician selection intention compared to their counterparts. Consumers\' locus attributions on the negative reviews affected their evaluation process. Physician attribution mediated the effects of review proportion (β=-0.150, P<.001), review claim type (β=-0.068, P=.01), and physician response (β=0.167, P<.001) on consumer choice. Reviewer attribution also mediated the effects of review proportion (β=-0.071, P<.001), review claim type (β=-0.025, P=.01), and physician response (β=0.096, P<.001) on consumer choice. The moderating effects of the physician response on the relationship between review proportion and physician attribution (β=-0.185, P<.001), review proportion and reviewer attribution (β=-0.110, P<.001), claim type and physician attribution (β=-0.123, P=.003), and claim type and reviewer attribution (β=-0.074, P=.04) were all significant.
CONCLUSIONS: Negative review features and the physician response significantly influence consumer choice through the causal attribution to physicians and reviewers. Physician attribution has a greater effect on consumers\' physician selection intention than reviewer attribution does. The presence of a physician response decreases the influence of negative reviews through direct and moderating effects. We propose some practical implications for physicians, health care providers, and online medical service platforms.

It is widely assumed that the term \"weakness\" has negative psychological effects and should be replaced by \"area for improvement.\" The present study is the first to examine the matter experimentally. It was hypothesised that effects of \"weakness\" (vs. \"area for improvement\") are most pronounced in those with low perceived self-efficacy in the relevant domain. Two experiments were conducted in the domain of self-regulation. In those with low perceived self-efficacy for self-regulation (PSESR), \"weakness\" apparently had a negative indirect effect on improvement expectancy by increasing the perceived stability (Experiment 1) or lowering the perceived controllability (Experiment 2) of the problem. Moreover, at low levels of PSESR in Experiment 2, estimated indirect effects of \"weakness\" on perceived value of improvement were both positive and negative. However, gender apparently moderated those effects. \"Weakness\" apparently lowered perceived controllability in both males and females but in women the negative effect was more pronounced when PSESR was low. In addition, \"weakness\" apparently increased perceived internality in males with low PSESR. Compared to \"area for improvement,\" \"weakness\" may indeed have some (negative) psychological effects in people with low perceived self-efficacy in the relevant domain. Given the ubiquity of these terms in evaluative contexts and the widespread fears of the term \"weakness,\" more experimental research needs to be conducted.

BACKGROUND: According to gender-differentiated attributions of failure in the STEM field, errors tend to be attributed to internal factors more to girls than to boys.
OBJECTIVE: This experimental study explored factors influencing gender-differentiated teachers\' internal attributions of girls\' and boys\' errors and the consequent likelihood of teachers\' hesitancy to offer educational robotics (ER) courses to them. The predictions were as follows: (1) the likelihood of teachers\' hesitancy would be related to gender-differentiated internal attributions of errors based on expectations of a low natural aptitude for girls; and (2) teachers with high levels of gender stereotypes would be more hesitant about offering ER to girls than to boys via the mediation of internal attributions of errors as being due to girls\' low levels of natural aptitude for ER.
METHODS: In this experimental study, 155 Italian teachers (M = 38.59 years, SD = 8.20) responded to a questionnaire at the end of a course on ER in 2022. Teachers randomly read one of two vignettes describing a girl\'s or a boy\'s error during an ER course.
RESULTS: Results of multiple regression and moderated mediation analyses confirmed both predictions.
CONCLUSIONS: In order to reduce the gender STEM gap, the tendency to attribute girls\' errors to internal and natural causes should be better inspected.

Background: The perceived culpability of a sexual crime perpetrator may be attributed as a function of both the legality of the substance used when committing the crime and the severity of the sex crime. Objectives: The experiment applied attribution theory to examine the simultaneous impact of substance use legality and sexual crime severity on participants\' perceptions of responsibility, blame, and punishment toward sexual crime perpetrators. Methods: Participants (N = 461) in this 4 (substance legality) × 2 (sexual crime severity) experimental design were randomly assigned to one of eight conditions to read a police report depicting a sexual offense. The independent variable of substance legality was manipulated as the perpetrator\'s usage of no substance (sober), alcohol (legal), marijuana (partially legal), or cocaine (illegal) at the time of the crime. The second independent variable of sexual crime severity was manipulated as the offense of indecent exposure (mild offense) or rape (severe offense) committed by the perpetrator. After reading the manipulated vignette, participants rated outcome measures involving the perpetrator\'s responsibility, blame (guilt attributions, external attributions, and mental element attributions), and punishment (punishment attitudes and punishment severity). Results: Factorial MANCOVA and ANCOVAs were performed. Participants tended to attribute greater responsibility and blame, but not punishment, toward the sober perpetrator compared to the perpetrator intoxicated with alcohol, marijuana, or cocaine. Additionally, participants attributed significantly greater responsibility, blame, and punishment toward the perpetrator of rape compared to indecent exposure. Conclusions: The experiment supported that both substance legality and sexual crime severity uniquely served as contextual factors that played roles in people\'s judgments about crimes. Findings offer drug policy information regarding how substance intoxication is perceived as a mitigating excuse in criminal justice systems for committing sexual offenses.

The under-researching of Latinx employees in the organizational diversity literature is of critical importance as extant research indicates that findings relevant to frequently studied minority employees may not be applicable to Latinx employees. One factor that differentiates Latinx employees in the U.S. from other racial and ethnic minorities is their use of, or perceived use of, language. In this research, we investigated how inclusion efforts that incorporated multiple languages into the workplace impacted employment outcomes for Latinx employees following a workplace accident. In three separate studies, we found that factors such as the language used to communicate a safety warning (Studies 1 & 2) and employee ethnicity (Studies 2 & 3) influenced blame attributed to a low-level leader (the job foreman), but they had no relationship with blame attributed toward the injured employee who was the target of communication. Consequently, these findings differ from attribution theory research which has posited that blame shifts from one entity to another. Additionally, extant research on employment discrimination has typically focused on differential outcomes for occupational minorities. Our findings, however, suggest that researchers should examine the conditions in which equal treatment (despite perceived differences in needs) could place traditionally marginalized populations at a systematic disadvantage and, consequently, may actually be indicative of workplace discrimination.