The Impact Of Perspective Taking On Implicit AIDS Stigma And Its Psychological Mechanism

Nowadays people living with HIV/AIDS as a special social group of great concerns has been paid a lot of attentions by researchers.For those people,the discrimination and stigma form society not only have a bad effect on their mental health and treatment compliance but also bring some troubles to their families and AIDS-related workers.With the hypothesis of contact and the appliance of perspective taking in other stigma-coping areas,this study wants to explore the appliance of perspective taking on AIDS-stigma coping area.According to different contagious ways of AIDS,we can divide the patients into patients infected via controllable/uncontrollable ways.This study will pay attention to this variable and verify the effect of perspective taking(including cognitive and emotional perspective taking)to sigma of AIDS patient who are infected by different ways.At the same time,this study will try to figure out the psychological mechanism behind this effect.Based on previous researches,when people try to take perspective of somebody,the positive part of themselves will be project into the others,thus improve their assessment of other people.Based on these results,this study will try to explore the effect of self-other overlap in different ways of perspective taking and controllable or uncontrollable perspective-taking objects.The preliminary experiment verified that people's attitude toward controllable or uncontrollable AIDS patients was different;Research one tried to find the effect of different way of perspective taking and controllable or uncontrollable perspective-taking objects toward people inner cognitive and emotional stigma and behaviors;And research two tried to find out the effect of self-other overlap in this process.The main conclusions of this study are as follows:(1)Under different ways and objects of perspective-taking,the participants all showed an implicit cognitive and emotional stigma towards AIDS patients.(2)The participants showed some differences under different ways of perspective-taking.The implicit cognitive stigma was stronger in cognitive perspective-taking than in emotional perspective-taking and control group.(3)The participants showed different helping willingness under different ways and objects of perspective-taking.For controllable infection patients,helping willingness was the same under three kinds of perspective-taking.For uncontrollable infection patients,participants showed more helping willingness under experimental group than under control group.(4)Under different objects of perspective-taking,self-other overlap(including the scale of self-other overlap and the personality scale)was bigger in uncontrollable group than in controllable group.Under different ways of perspective-taking,the overlap was bigger in cognitive perspective-taking than in control group.(5)When the object was controllable infection patients,perspective-taking would improve participants' implicit cognitive stigma and self-other overlap acts as the mediator in this process.Self-other overlap doesn't act as the mediator between perspective-taking and implicit emotional stigma and helping willingness.(6)When the objects are uncontrollable infection patients,perspective-taking would improve participants' implicit cognitive stigma and improve the willingness to help,and self-other overlap acts as the mediator in this process.Self-other overlap doesn't act as the mediator between perspective-taking and implicit emotional stigma.