Fear of people with mental illnesses: The role of personal and impersonal contact and exposure to threat or harm
Fear of people with mental illnesses: The role of personal and impersonal contact and exposure to threat or harm
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DOI：
10.1177/002214650404500105
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发表时间：
2004-03-01
影响因子：
5
通讯作者：
Link, BG
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Phelan, JC;Link, BG
小插图和实验室实验表明，对精神疾病患者的负面反应是其症状行为的直接后果，但由于其外部效度较差，这些研究无法告诉我们，公众对精神疾病患者的广泛负面反应是否实际上是由于对症状行为的观察造成的。围绕感知到的危险，我们使用大型全国性调查来检验普通人群中的“行为假设”。我们推断，如果这个假设是正确的，那么与精神疾病患者的接触应该与更多的感知危险相关，而暴露于威胁或伤害应该调解这种关联。相反，有更多个人和非个人接触的受访者认为患有精神疾病的人危险性较小。在接触较多的人中，暴露于威胁的情况更为常见，但这种暴露几乎不能解释感知危险的差异。这些发现并不支持公众对精神疾病患者的恐惧是由于观察到暴力行为而得出的结论。
Vignette and laboratory experiments suggest that negative reactions to people with mental illness are a direct consequence of their symptomatic behavior, but because of their poor external validity, these studies cannot tell us whether widespread negative public reactions to people with mental illness actually result from observation of symptomatic behavior Focusing on perceived danger we use a large national survey to test the "behavior hypothesis" in the general population. We reason that, if this hypothesis is correct, contact with people with mental illnesses should be associated with more perceived danger, and exposure to threat or harm should mediate this association. On the contrary, respondents with more personal and impersonal contact perceive people with mental illness to be less dangerous. Exposure to threat is more common among people with more contact, but this exposure explains very little of the variance in perceived danger These findings do not support the conclusion that public fear of people with mental illness is due to the observation of violent behavior.