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Responses to Persons with AIDS: Fear of Contagion or Stigma? 1
Author(s) -
Bishop George D.,
Alva Albert L.,
Cantu Lionel,
Rittiman Telecia K.
Publication year - 1991
Publication title -
journal of applied social psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.822
H-Index - 111
eISSN - 1559-1816
pISSN - 0021-9029
DOI - 10.1111/j.1559-1816.1991.tb00511.x
Subject(s) - psychology , homosexuality , disease , association (psychology) , stigma (botany) , social psychology , illness behavior , clinical psychology , developmental psychology , psychiatry , psychotherapist , medicine , psychoanalysis , pathology
Recently it has been argued that responses to persons with Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) are more a function of the association of AIDS with homosexuality than they are concerns about contagion. This research provided a further test of these arguments using an experimental design in which the target disease's contagiousness and association with homosexuality were manipulated. The results indicated that willingness to interact with a disease victim was strongly related to the contagiousness of the disease but only weakly related to its association with homosexuality. These findings are in line with recent research on lay conceptions of physical illness and argue that avoidance of disease victims, including persons with AIDS, primarily reflects concerns over contracting the disease. The implications of these findings for lay illness conceptions and how lay people respond to disease victims are discussed.