Objective: The purpose of this study was to assess the relationship between college student perceived and personal mental health stigmas. Participants: A sample of 352 undergraduate college students from two large Universities in the Eastern United States was utilized. Methodology: A self-report anonymous online survey was utilized. The survey…

This cross-cultural study examined Koreans' and Americans' explicit stigma and implicit biases toward autism to examine potential mechanisms underlying recent evidence for heightened explicit autism stigma in South Korea relative to the United States. This evidence is somewhat at odds with other evidence that individuals living in collectivistic…

The purpose of this quantitative study was to determine the efficacy of an online education and contact-based stigma reduction training, "Stigma Reduction Training--Counselor," developed specifically for training counselors-in-training using a human centered design approach. The mental health profession recognizes the extensive nature of…

People believe that treatments for illnesses are effective when they target the cause of the illness. Prior work suggests that biological essentialist explanations of mental illness lead people to prefer medications or other pharmacological treatments. However, prior work has not distinguished between biological and essentialist explanations. In…

Although stigma negatively impacts autistic people globally, the degree of stigma varies across cultures. Prior research suggests that stigma may be higher in cultures with more collectivistic orientations. This study aimed to identify cultural values and other individual differences that contribute to cross-cultural differences in autism stigma…

This study examined whether attitudes based on labels and counselor demographics predicted empathy and rape myth acceptance in counselors. A difference in attitudes based on the labels of either "prostitute" or "sex trafficking" was found. Attitudes based on labels and counselor demographics additionally predicted scores of…

The examination of barriers in relation to college students' vocational choice and development is an important area of research, but the barrier of classism is relatively underexamined. This may be due to the deficiencies in measurement, so we describe herein the development of a new measure, the Experiences with Classism scale (EWCS). The EWCS…

The majority of hate crimes in the United States are driven by racial bias. However, extra-legal factors such as the perpetrators' motivations, the races of the victims and perpetrators, and the presence or absence of hate symbols or slurs often result in ambiguity in the classification of crimes as hate crimes. This uncertainty evokes…

Two studies were conducted to investigate a revised and extended version of the Lesbian and Gay Identity Scale (Mohr & Fassinger, 2000): the 27-item Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Identity Scale (LGBIS). This revision features more inclusive and less stigmatizing language than the previous version and includes 2 new subscales assessing identity…

The authors explored attitudes toward adults with mental illness. Results suggest that mental health trainees and professionals had less stigmatizing attitudes than did non-mental-health trainees and professionals. Professionals receiving supervision had higher mean scores on the Benevolence subscale than did professionals who were not receiving…

When a crime is committed by an individual of one race against an individual of another race, there is the possibility that the crime is a hate crime. Legislation often mandates harsher penalties for perpetrators convicted of crimes determined to be hate crimes, yet this determination is difficult to make. This study used vignettes of violent…