Non-disables’ Implicit Attitudes Towards Physically Disabled Persons And Their Plasticity

Discrimination towards individuals with disabilities may not only negatively influence their quality oflife in areas such as education, employment, housing, marriage and everyday interactions with the generalpublic, but also result in them experiencing negative self-evaluations, feelings of powerlessness, andfrustration, which may enhance their psychological and behavior disorders such as interpersonal and socialwithdrawal. Thus, exploring non-disables’ attitudes towards disabled persons and their improvement maynot only provide insights into the interaction between the two groups, but also could inspire the disabled todevelop good characteristics and guide the non-disabled to change their negative attitude. As self-reportmeasures that examine attitudes towards persons with disabilities have always been questioned both for thevalidity and usefulness, therefore, in recent10years, researchers have explored individuals’ automaticattitudes towards the disabled with implicit measures, mainly using IAT. However, in previous researches,the attribute words of IAT were not sufficiently related to the disabled. Meanwhile, most of them focusedon the non-disables’ implicit evaluation, paying little attention on their emotion and behavior. Besides, theimprovement of non-disables’ attitude towards the disabled were not conducted systematically.Based on the review of previous investigations, the present study, which contained three studies andsix experiments, systematically examines non-disables’ implicit attitude, ie. cognitive(study1), affect(study2), behavior(study3), respectly, towards physically disabled persons with the revised IAT and the Pull/PushTask. Meanwhile, disabled persons’ positive behavior information was introduced as a prime prior to theIAT or the Pull/Push Task to explore its effect on non-disables’ implicit attitudes. The aim of this study wasto give insights into understanding the public’s attitude towards the disabled and into the interactionbetween the two groups, meanwhile provide evidence to design a valid intervention program of changingthe public’s negative attitude. The main conclusions were as follows:(1)Non-disabled persons held negative implicit evaluation (study1, experiment1), high disgustcoexisting with high empathy but low admiration implicit emotion (study2, experiment3), and automaticavoid behavioral tendency (study3, experiment5) towards physically disableds.(2)Positive information about disabled persons not only negatively primed on implicit negativeevaluations towards the disabled (study1, experiment2), but also positively primed on implicitadmiration(study2, experiment4), meanwhile it positively primed on auto-approach behavioral tendency,and negatively primed on auto-avoid behavioral tendency (study3, experiment6) towards them.