Abstract
Public health campaigns promote messages encouraging people to maintain a healthy weight and avoid obesity. Obesity messages are often presented with different framings (e.g., obesity as a disease, obesity as under personal control). In this work, we examined the potential consequences of framing obesity as a disease, versus controllable, on executing functioning. In two studies, participants who self-identified as having higher body weight (Study 1: N = 156 undergraduate students; Study 2: N = 253 U.S. adults) read an article framing obesity as a disease, an article framing obesity as controllable, or a control article about climate change, and then they completed an executive-function task. Additionally, in Study 2 only, participants completed self-report measures of perceived control, negative mood, stress, and situational self-awareness to test as possible mediators of observed framing effects. In Study 1, participants who reported that obesity was a disease performed significantly worse on the executive-function task than did participants in the controllable condition or the climate-change control condition. In Study 2, this result was replicated, and we tested perceived control, negative mood, perceived stress, and situational self-awareness as plausible mediators; no significant mediation was observed. Framing obesity as a disease may inadvertently decrease executive functioning among people who consider themselves to have higher weight.