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LATNER, JANET D., MURRAY SIMMONDS, JULIET K. ROSEWALL, AND ALBERT J. STUNKARD. Assessment of obesity stigmatization in children and adolescents: modernizing a standard measure. Obesity. 2007;15:3078 -3085. Objective: Stigmatization of overweight children is highly prevalent. However, the measurement of stigma has varied widely across studies. An up-to-date version of a commonly used measure of weight-related stigma is needed. Research Methods and Procedures: Poser 5 (DAZ software) was used to develop 12 modernized figures, using three-dimensional models rendered as high-resolution images. They depicted one overweight, one non-overweight, and four disabled children of each sex. Children recruited from public and private schools (N ϭ 261; mean age, 11.3 years; median BMI z-score ϭ 0.33; 77.0% white, 11.5% Asian, and 7.7% Maori) ranked these figures in order of liking. Participants also ranked traditionally used line drawings depicting comparable images. Participants rated each new figure on measures of liking and stereotypical attributes on 100-mm visual analog scales (VASs). Rankings of overweight and other figures were also highly correlated with VAS assessment of liking and with a composite, internally consistent VAS measure of liking and stereotypical attributes. Only negative stereotypes about the intelligence of overweight boys and girls contributed significantly to the variance in liking. Discussion: An updated and modernized tool for assessing children's weight stigma was developed and its construct validity supported. The present findings suggest that stereotypes about low intelligence may contribute to weight stigma among children. More research is needed on the causes and components of weight stigma so that it can be effectively reduced.

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METHOD Subjects The Ss were 102 undergraduates, mostly first-year psychology students, 51 male and 51 female, all naive with respect to the psychophysical theory involved.

Nine different formats of a street map were designed to test effects of contrast between city blocks, streets and street names. The position of the streets and their names remained constant. The contrast between city blocks, streets and names was varied by using combinations of black, white and grey in the designs. Four different map reading tasks were used to test each of the nine formats: 288 undergraduate students were tested on the 36 combinations of format and task. Λ two-way analysis of variance was conducted. The means were analysed using Tukey's HSD test. Both factors were found to be significant at the 0.01 level, indicating that variations in the formats significantly influenced performance on the various map-reading tasks.