关键词: 心理疾病内隐污名, 概念词, 类别标签, 单一类型内隐联想测验

Abstract: Mental illness Stigma remains a serious social issue and significant barrier to mental health service. Previous studies have revealed some automatically-activated aspects of mental illness stigma, including implicit negative cognition, passive emotion and discrimination tendency. However, very little has been done to examine the validity of stimuli words representing mental illness in the measurement of implicit stigma. Researchers have found that the labels and symptoms of illness play some role in stigmatization. However, most of symptoms could be concealed by people with mental illness intentionally; and people might fail to identify or distinguish different mental illness for lacking mental health knowledge. Public are more likely to distinguish person with mental illness by labels, which could be conceptualized into two major categories: relevant labels (RL, such as Mental Problem, Mental Counselling, and Psychiatric Hospitals) and specific labels (SL, such as Anxiety Disorder, Depression Disorder, and Schizophrenia). Both kinds of labels were frequently used to measure implicit stigma toward mental illness in existed studies. The purpose of this study was to examine whether these labels represent mental illness in implicit stigma measures. Two experiments in which participants were required to complete one Single Category Implicit Association Tests (SC-IAT) were designed to examine the validity of RL and SL. In the SC-IAT, the labels of attitude object was “mental illness,” and the stimuli words of “mental illness” were respectively 6 RL and 6 SL which had been evaluated in pilot study. Two tests had the same attribute labels (“negative word” and “positive word,”) in the SC-IAT, and the same stimuli words of attribute (12 typical attitude words toward mental illness evidenced in previous study). The three category labels were shown on either side of the screen at the top (i.e., “mental illness” or “negative words” on the right side, and “positive words” on the left side in one stage), and the stimuli words were presented at the centre of the screen consecutively. The task of SC-IAT requires items to be classified when the category labels are paired on either side of the screen. This paradigm assumed that the stimuli would be classified more quickly if the target and attribute category pairs match participants’ automatic associations, and that the stimuli would be processed more slowly if these pairs contradict automatic associations. Results of SC-IAT showed that stimuli words were classified accurately and more quickly when RL or SL were matched with negative words (attitude words toward mental illness) compared to positive words. These results indicated that both categorical labels had closer automatic association with negative words relative to positive words, and provided some supports to claim that these words were the representative category labels of mental illness and could be used to measure implicit stigma toward mental illness.

Key words: implicit stigma toward mental illness, concept word, category label, SC-IAT