Weight Discrimination Research Articles

Long term results of primary repair of combined cuts of median and ulnar nerves on forearm

The objective of this clinical study was to evaluate sensory and motor functions in the later period following primary repair of combined injuries of the ulnar and median nerves in the forearm at proximal, middle, and distal levels. Later period sensory evaluation of ulnar and median combined cuts was performed using two-point discrimination and monofilament tests. On the other hand, motor evaluation was performed by determining dorsal palmar interosseus strength for the ulnar nerve and abductor pollicis brevis muscle strength for the median nerve. Cold intolerance, object recognition, and weight discrimination were also reviewed. In total, 26 patients with ulnar-median combined cut and aged between 5 and 59 years were included in this study. Although no deficiency was observed in the sensory functions of any of the patients, a decrease in tactile sensation was detected in the median sensory region in 12 (46%) patients and in the ulnar sensory region in 7 (26%) patients. The most significant loss in terms of motor functions was detected in the opposition pinch strength. Two patients developed claw hand and two showed joint contracture. Ideal treatment for peripheral nerve injuries should be primary repair. Restoration of the motor function in the median nerve is relatively easier than that in the ulnar nerve. No significant difference was observed in terms of sensory function. An alternative is needed for primary repair because of lack of motor function in proximal ulnar incisions. There is no standardization of tests performed for peripheral nerve repair.

Visual Tracking via Sparse Representation with Reliable Structure Constraint

In this letter, we present a novel visual tracking algorithm based on sparse representation. In contrast to just use the target templates and the trivial templates to sparsely represent the target, we propose to further constrain the model with a set of discriminative weight maps. These weight maps contain the reliable structures of the target object. They help the model penalize the trivial template coefficients depending on the reliable structures of the target object. Then, the target object can be well represented by a sparse set of target templates together with a sparse set of target weight maps. We propose a unified objective function to integrate these two sparse representation problems together. This optimization problem can be well solved by the proposed iteration manner and a customized accelerated proximal gradient method. Furthermore, a novel weight map constructing method is proposed based on consistent motion property and forward–backward errors. Plenty of qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that our method performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods in a wide range of tracking scenarios.

Erratum to: Perceived Weight Discrimination and 10-year Risk of Allostatic Load Among US Adults.

Erratum to: Perceived Weight Discrimination and 10-year Risk of Allostatic Load Among US Adults.

Modality-Invariant Image Classification Based on Modality Uniqueness and Dictionary Learning.

We present a unified framework for the image classification of image sets taken under varying modality conditions. Our method is motivated by a key observation that the image feature distribution is simultaneously influenced by the semantic-class and the modality category label, which limits the performance of conventional methods for that task. With this insight, we introduce modality uniqueness as a discriminative weight that divides each modality cluster from all other clusters. By leveraging the modality uniqueness, our framework is formulated as unsupervised modality clustering and classifier learning based on modality-invariant similarity kernel. Specifically, in the assignment step, each training image is first assigned to the most similar cluster according to its modality. In the update step, based on the current cluster hypothesis, the modality uniqueness and the sparse dictionary are updated. These two steps are formulated in an iterative manner. Based on the final clusters, a modality-invariant marginalized kernel is then computed, where the similarities between the reconstructed features of each modality are aggregated across all clusters. Our framework enables the reliable inference of semantic-class category for an image, even across large photometric variations. Experimental results show that our method outperforms conventional methods on various benchmarks, such as landmark identification under severely varying weather conditions, domain-adapting image classification, and RGB and near-infrared image classification.

Perceived weight discrimination and chronic medical conditions in adults with overweight and obesity.

This study investigated whether perceived weight discrimination is associated with increased risk for major chronic medical conditions and whether the associations persist after adjusting for other stressful life events in addition to BMI, physical activity and sociodemographic variables. The study included 21357 overweight/obese adults (52.9% women) from the 2001 to 2002 and 2004 to 2005 National Survey of Alcohol and Related Conditions. Perceived weight discrimination was significantly associated with risk for arteriosclerosis, diabetes, high cholesterol, myocardial infarction, minor heart conditions and stomach ulcers. Perceived weight discrimination was associated with reporting more stressful life events. After adjusting additionally for stressful life events in the final multiple logistic regression, associations with arteriosclerosis, diabetes and minor cardiac conditions remained significant. Gender-stratified analyses revealed that perceived weight discrimination was associated with different medical conditions in women than men, and many associations became non-significant when adjusting for stressful life events, particularly for women. Among overweight/obese adults, perceived weight discrimination is associated with significantly increased risk for obesity-related chronic medical conditions even after adjusting for BMI, physical activity and sociodemographic variables. Accounting for other acute stressful life events may also be important in understanding the health effects of perceived weight discrimination. Such added health risk of overweight/obesity posed by perceived weight discrimination warrants public health and policy interventions against weight discrimination to reduce the socioeconomic burden of obesity.

Weighing the Options: Discrimination Against Fat Golfers

In drawing from multiple theoretical frameworks, including stigma theory (Goffman, 1963; Paetzold, Dipboye, & Eslbach, 2008) and social dominance theory (Sidanius & Pratto, 1999), the purpose of this study was to examine the possibility of weight discrimination among coaches of NCAA women’s golf teams. Coaches participated in an experimental study, where they reviewed the resumes of high school golfers and indicated the likelihood of offering the golfer an athletic scholarship. The resumes varied by weight of the golfer and skill level, and coaches’ social dominance orientation was also measured. Fat golfers were less likely to be offered a scholarship than were thinner golfers. Player skill level moderated these effects, as did the coaches’ social dominance orientation. Contributions, limitations, and future directions are discussed.

Shared somatosensory and motor functions in musicians.

Skilled individuals are characterized by fine-tuned perceptual and motor functions. Here, we tested the idea that the sensory and motor functions of highly-trained individuals are coupled. We assessed the relationships among multifaceted somatosensory and motor functions of expert pianists. The results demonstrated a positive covariation between the acuity of weight discrimination and the precision of force control during piano keystrokes among the pianists but not among the non-musicians. However, neither the age of starting musical training nor the total amount of life-long piano practice was correlated with these sensory-motor functions in the pianists. Furthermore, a difference between the pianists and non-musicians was absent for the weight discrimination acuity but present for precise force control during keystrokes. The results suggest that individuals with innately superior sensory function had finer motor control only in a case of having undergone musical training. Intriguingly, the tactile spatial acuity of the fingertip was superior in the pianists compared with the non-musicians but was not correlated with any functions representing fine motor control among the pianists. The findings implicate the presence of two distinct mechanisms of sensorimotor learning elicited by musical training, which occur either independently in individual sensorimotor modalities or through interacting between modalities.

Singular value decomposition and local near neighbors for face recognition under varying illumination

Illumination processing is a challenging task in face recognition. Although numerous techniques have been proposed to tackle this problem, none of them can achieve high performance under different illumination variations. In this paper, we propose three closely related illumination processing techniques to address different illumination variations. First, we employ singular value decomposition (SVD) bases with frequency interpretation and corresponding contribution coefficients (i.e. normalized nonlinear singular values) to obtain the high-frequency facial features of a face image in logarithm domain, which is termed as the high-frequency SVD face (HFSVD-face). Moreover, we propose the adaptive HFSVD-face (AHFSVD-face), which adaptively selects a special nonlinear parameter to generate HFSVD-face according to the face image illumination level. The illumination level of a face image is estimated by its singular values. Second, we construct the local near neighbor feature (LNN-feature) based on the local region, which is an illumination invariant measure. Then the discriminative weights (DWs) and Gaussian weights (GWs) respectively combine with several LNN-features to generate the fusion LNN-feature (FLNN-feature), which can be named as DWFLNN-feature and GWLNN-feature. The bipolar sigmoidal function removes the high-frequency interference of FLNN-feature to form LNN-face (including DWLNN-face and GWLNN-face). Third, we develop the H&L_SVD as a preprocessing technique, which consists of the normalized low-frequency components and the corrected high-frequency components divided by SVD. And then the illumination insensitive measure can be extracted from H&L_SVD by LNN-face to robustly tackle the face image with severe illumination variations. The performances of the proposed methods are verified using Yale B, CMU PIE, LFW and our self-built driver face databases. The experimental results indicate that the proposed methods can obtain high performances under different illumination variations and outperform several state-of-the-art approaches which are proposed to address face recognition under varying illumination.

Supplemental Material for Perceived Weight Discrimination Mediates the Prospective Relation Between Obesity and Depressive Symptoms in U.S. and U.K. Adults

Supplemental Material for Perceived Weight Discrimination Mediates the Prospective Relation Between Obesity and Depressive Symptoms in U.S. and U.K. Adults

Perceived weight discrimination and chronic biochemical stress: A population-based study using cortisol in scalp hair.

ObjectiveThere is increasing evidence for weight‐based discrimination against persons with obesity. This study aimed to examine the physiological impact of perceived weight discrimination on cortisol in hair, an indicator of chronic stress exposure.MethodsData were from 563 nonsmoking individuals with obesity (body mass index, BMI ≥30 kg/m2) participating in the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing. Experiences of discrimination were reported via questionnaire, and hair cortisol concentrations were determined from the scalp‐nearest 2‐cm hair segment. Height and weight were objectively measured. ANCOVAs tested associations between perceived weight discrimination and hair cortisol concentration overall and by degree of obesity. All analyses were adjusted for age, sex, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and BMI.ResultsMean hair cortisol concentrations were 33% higher in those who had experienced weight discrimination than those who had not (mean log pg/mg 1.241 vs. 0.933, F = 12.01, P = 0.001). The association between weight discrimination and hair cortisol was particularly pronounced in individuals with severe (class II/III) obesity (1.402 vs. 0.972, F = 11.58, P = 0.001).ConclusionsWeight discrimination is associated with the experience of stress at a biological level. Chronic exposure to elevated levels of cortisol may play a role in generating a vicious circle of weight gain and discrimination and contribute to obesity‐associated health conditions.

Coping with perceived weight discrimination: testing a theoretical model for examining the relationship between perceived weight discrimination and depressive symptoms in a representative sample of individuals with obesity.

The association between obesity and perceived weight discrimination has been investigated in several studies. Although there is evidence that perceived weight discrimination is associated with negative outcomes on psychological well-being, there is a lack of research examining possible buffering effects of coping strategies in dealing with experiences of weight discrimination. The present study aims to fill that gap. We examined the relationship between perceived weight discrimination and depressive symptoms and tested whether problem-solving strategies and/or avoidant coping strategies mediated this effect. Using structural equation modeling, we analyzed representative cross-sectional data of n=484 German-speaking individuals with obesity (BMI⩾30 kg m-2), aged 18 years and older. Results revealed a direct effect of perceived weight discrimination on depressive symptoms. Further, the data supported a mediational linkage for avoidant coping strategies, not for problem-solving strategies. Higher scores of perceived weight discrimination experiences were associated with both coping strategies, but only avoidant coping strategies were positively linked to more symptoms of depression. Perceived weight discrimination was associated with increased depressive symptoms both directly and indirectly through situational coping strategies. Avoidant coping has the potential to exacerbate depressive symptoms, whereas problem-solving strategies were ineffective in dealing with experiences of weight discrimination. We emphasize the importance of coping strategies in dealing with experiences of weight discrimination and the need to distinguish between using a strategy and benefiting from it without detriment.

Perceived weight discrimination, changes in health, and daily stressors.

To examine whether perceived weight discrimination is associated with change in health markers over time and whether it is associated with daily stressors, physical symptoms, and affect. Participants were selected from the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) study if they had data on perceived weight discrimination and health markers at MIDUS II (2004-2006), health markers at MIDUS III (2013-2014), and a body mass index ≥25 kg/m(2) (N = 1,841). A subset of these participants (N = 1,153) reported on their experiences daily for 8 days as part of the second National Study of Daily Experiences. Perceived weight discrimination was associated with declines in mental and physical health over time (median β = 0.06). Participants who reported weight discrimination experienced more daily stressors (β = 0.13), physical symptoms (β = 0.13), and negative affect (β = 0.13) and less positive affect (β = -0.12) over the 8 days of the second National Study of Daily Experiences. Weight discrimination was most strongly associated with interpersonal stressors (median β = 0.14), feelings of anger (β = 0.16) and frustration (β = 0.14), lower attention (β = -0.14) and activity (β = -0.16), and more nonspecific physical symptoms (e.g., fatigue; β = 0.10). This research replicates the association between perceived weight discrimination and worse health over time and extends this literature to show that people who experience weight discrimination have more daily stressors, physical symptoms, and negative emotions.

Perceived Weight Discrimination and 10-Year Risk of Allostatic Load Among US Adults.

Discrimination promotes multisystem physiological dysregulation termed allostatic load, which predicts morbidity and mortality. It remains unclear whether weight-related discrimination influences allostatic load. The aim of this study was to prospectively examine 10-year associations between weight discrimination, allostatic load, and its components among adults 25-75years in the Midlife Development in the US Biomarker Substudy. Participants with information on weight discrimination were analyzed (n=986). At both timepoints, participants self-reported the frequency of perceived weight discrimination across nine scenarios as "never/rarely" (scored as 0), "sometimes" (1), or "often" (2). The two scores were averaged and then dichotomized as "experienced" versus "not experienced" discrimination. High allostatic load was defined as having ≥3 out of 7 dysregulated systems (cardiovascular, sympathetic/parasympathetic nervous systems, hypothalamic pituitary axis, inflammatory, lipid/metabolic, and glucose metabolism), which collectively included 24 biomarkers. Relative risks (RR) were estimated from multivariate models adjusted for sociodemographic and health characteristics, other forms of discrimination, and BMI. Over 41% of the sample had obesity, and 6% reported weight discrimination at follow-up. In multivariable-adjusted analyses, individuals who experienced (versus did not experience) weight discrimination had twice the risk of high allostatic load (RR, 2.07; 95% CI, 1.21; 3.55 for baseline discrimination; 2.16, 95% CI, 1.39; 3.36 for long-term discrimination). Weight discrimination was associated with lipid/metabolic dysregulation (1.56; 95% CI 1.02, 2.40), glucose metabolism (1.99; 95% CI 1.34, 2.95), and inflammation (1.76; 95% CI 1.22, 2.54), but no other systems. Perceived weight discrimination doubles the 10-year risk of high allostatic load. Eliminating weight stigma may reduce physiological dysregulation, improving obesity-related morbidity and mortality.

The Waiter’s Weight

Does the weight of a server have an influence on how much food diners order in the high-involvement environment of a restaurant? If people are paying for a full meal, this has implications for consumers, restaurants, and public health. To investigate this, 497 interactions between diners and servers were observed in 60 different full-service restaurants. Diners ordered significantly more items when served by heavy wait staff with high body mass indexes (BMI; p < .001) compared with wait staff with low body mass indexes. Specifically, they were four times as likely to order desserts ( p < .01), and they ordered 17.65% more alcoholic drinks ( p < .01). These findings provide valuable evidence in recent lawsuits against weight discrimination, and it suggests to consumers who decide what they will and will not order at a restaurant—such as a salad appetizer, no dessert, and one drink—than to decide when the waiter arrives.

Optimally weighted maximum a posteriori probabilities based on minimum classification error for dual-microphone voice activity detection

The dual-microphone voice activity detection (VAD) technique is proposed by applying discriminative weight training to achieve optimal weighting of spatial features available within the dual-microphone VAD. Since the motivation behind our method is to use the relevant spatial information available from the two microphones, we employ the phase difference, coherence, and power level difference ratio (PLDR) as a feature vector, and then use this feature vector to derive the maximum a posteriori (MAP) probabilities. Then, we combine each MAP probability based on a discriminative weight training, i.e., the minimum classification error (MCE) method to offer an optimal VAD decision in a spectral domain, which successfully represents the dynamic evolution of speech over time even in the non-stationary noise environments. The proposed dual-microphone VAD algorithm outperforms conventional dual-microphone VAD methods based on only single feature among the PLDR, phase difference, and spectral coherence.

Prime-Time Weight Discrimination: A Body Weight Analysis of Prime-Time Television Characters From 1950-2015

To compare the BMIs of TV characters and the general American public over the past 65 years. Compared to thin characters, obese characters are underrepresented and routinely cast in stereotypical roles. This type of media weight discrimination is argued to contribute to the social acceptability of weight stigmatization in real life. Given this suggestion, tracking this underrepresentation longitudinally could help elucidate how media weight discrimination contributes to real life weight stigmatization. The BMIs of lead actors appearing in top-ten primetime television shows from 1950 to 2015 (defined by Nielsen ratings) were coded using the Stunkard Figure Rating Scale. The average BMI of Americans over the same time period was obtained through the CDC’s National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys. Linear trend analyses were used to track and compare the BMI changes in both TV characters and the American public over time. Whereas the average BMI of the American public has linearly increased every decade, the BMI of TV characters has linearly decreased over the same time period (p = .001). The average BMI of female TV characters decreased by 16.95% (p < .001) and the average BMI of male characters decreased by 8.91% (p < .01). Conversely, the average BMI of the american female increased by 25.8% and the average BMI of the american male increased by 18.7%. The decreasing BMI of TV characters, combined with the increasing BMI of the American public, underscores the increasingly unrealistic ideals portrayed in the media and may contribute to weight stigmatization.

The obesity penalty in the labor market using longitudinal Canadian data

A Canadian study of weight discrimination also known as the obesity wage-penalty. This paper adds to the limited Canadian literature while also introducing a causal model, which can be applied to future Canadian studies. A general working-class sample group is utilized with personal income, which removes many biases introduced in other studies. The evidence suggests that a 1-unit increase in lagged BMI is associated with a 0.7% decrease in personal for obese Canadian females. Similar to other studies, the male results are inconsistent. The evidence brought forward in this study can provide an effective financial incentive for health promotion among Canadians for law and policy makers. Beyond health reasons, these results can also be applied as empirical evidence of gender discrimination based on body image perception. The evidence suggests that male physique is not a contributing factor in income, but larger female physique is associated with lower personal income.

Spatial and temporal scoring for egocentric video summarization

We present a summarization approach for egocentric video. Given hours of video, the proposed method produces a compact storyboard summary of the camera wearer's day. In contrast to traditional keyframe selection techniques, the resulting summary focuses on the most important video shots which reflect high stable salience, discrimination and representativeness. To accomplish this, we utilize egocentric salience cues, motion cues and a selection model to capture stable salience weight, discriminative weight and representative weight of a video shot respectively. We further combine these weights in a unified framework to predict the importance score of a shot, based on which, important shots are selected for the storyboard. Critically, the approach is neither camera-wearer-specific nor object-specific; that means the learned importance metric need not be trained for a given user or context, and it can predict the importance of shots that have never been seen previously. Experimental results on three video datasets across various genres demonstrate that our proposed approach clearly outperforms several state-of-the-art methods.

Perceived weight discrimination, childhood maltreatment, and weight gain in U.S. adults with overweight/obesity.

Perceived weight discrimination and childhood maltreatment have been independently associated with physical and mental health issues, as well as weight gain. It is not known, however, whether childhood maltreatment modifies the relationship between perceived weight discrimination and weight changes. This study examined the relationship between perceived weight discrimination, childhood maltreatment, and changes in body mass index (BMI) over 3 years in 21,357 men and women with overweight and obesity from Wave 1 and Wave 2 surveys of the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions (NESARC). Reporting childhood maltreatment, regardless of the specific form of maltreatment, was associated with a significantly greater likelihood of perceived weight discrimination in women. Perceived weight discrimination was associated with a significantly greater increase in BMI in both genders. Among all women with perceived weight discrimination, those who also reported having experienced childhood maltreatment had significantly less BMI increase compared to those reporting not having experienced childhood maltreatment. Perceived weight discrimination may foster weight gain rather than encouraging weight loss in individuals with overweight/obesity and should be addressed in prevention efforts and clinical settings. Childhood maltreatment may perhaps sensitize individuals to subsequent stressors and increase vulnerability to perceived weight discrimination, particularly in women.

Discrimination and sleep quality among older US adults: the mediating role of psychological distress

ObjectiveTo examine the association between everyday discrimination and sleep quality and identify mediating pathways between discrimination and sleep quality. DesignLongitudinal. SettingHealth and Retirement Study (HRS). ParticipantsParticipants (N = 9223, mean age 66.7 years, 12.8 years of education; 85% White, 12% African American, and 3% another race or ethnicity) who participated in 2006, 2008, 2010, and 2012. MeasurementsAt each assessment, participants completed measures of everyday discrimination, lifetime discrimination, attributions of discrimination, depressive symptoms, anxiety symptoms, sleep quality, and non-restfulness. ResultsMore experiences with everyday discrimination were associated with worse sleep quality (β = 0.048, SE = 0.009, P < .01). When psychological distress was added to this model, the direct effect was lower in both magnitude and significance (β = 0.029, SE = 0.011, P < .05), which indicated partial mediation. Psychological distress also fully mediated the relation between everyday discrimination and non-restfulness (direct effect: β = −0.003, SE = 0.010, ns). Individuals who experienced physical disability-based discrimination had worse sleep quality than those who did not experience this form of discrimination (β = 0.114, SE = 0.029, P < .01); psychological distress fully mediated this relation (direct effect: β = −0.025, SE = 0.031, ns). Among individuals with obesity, psychological distress fully mediated the relation between weight discrimination and sleep quality (direct effect: β = 0.036, SE = 0.025, ns), and partially mediated the relation between weight discrimination and non-restfulness (direct effect: β = 0.049, SE = 0.025, P < .05). ConclusionsEveryday discrimination and discrimination based specifically on weight or a physical disability were associated with worse sleep quality. The findings suggest that psychological distress may be one pathway through which these experiences are associated with worse sleep.