A study on the implicit and explicit attitudes towards schizophrenia

• Main Author: Phua, Hong Ling
• Other Authors: Ho Moon-Ho Ringo
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2015
• Subjects: DRNTU::Social sciences::Psychology
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/63443
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Understanding and measuring attitudes for specific mental illness can be crucial for a successful stigma intervention program. Past studies have focused primarily on assessing attitudes at the explicit level. However, recent development of alternate measures have sparked the interest in assessing attitudes at the implicit level, one that is assumed to be based on automatic associations under the absence of verbal report. Despite their significance in providing glimpses to one’s attitude, attitudes assessed implicitly and explicitly are not always related. While some studies attributed the dissociation to be a function of the properties of the measures, others have suggested explicit attitude to be the “distorted” version of the implicit attitude. This may be accountable by the Associative-Propositional Evaluation (APE) model (Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006), and the Motivation and Opportunity as Determinants of attitude-behavior relation (MODE) model (Fazio,1990) that were proposed for the role of social norms and social desirability in influencing the relationship between the implicit and explicit attitudes. Hence, current study examined the implicit and explicit attitudes towards Schizophrenia and also probed the relationship between them. Results suggested that participants were more likely to associate “Schizophrenia” with negative attributes on the implicit level and express attitudes that were slightly skewed towards negativity on the explicit level. Additionally, the degree of association between the two measures appears to vary across different levels of negativity of perceived public attitude, thus supporting the APE model. Future directions and the implications of results were also further discussed.