ROLE EXPECTATIONS AND BEHAVIOR TOWARD THE PHYSICALLY DISABLED (STIGMA, DEVIANCE).
Item
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Title
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ROLE EXPECTATIONS AND BEHAVIOR TOWARD THE PHYSICALLY DISABLED (STIGMA, DEVIANCE).
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Identifier
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AAI8423084
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identifier
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8423084
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Creator
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LUCIDO, DAVID JAMES.
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Contributor
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Irwin Katz
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Date
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1984
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Psychology, Social
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Abstract
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This paper addressed some issues raised by ambiguities in the findings of previous studies concerning the efficacy of acknowledgement of disability by the physically disabled in facilitating social interaction with the nondisabled. It was proposed that the positive effects of disability acknowledgement found in these previous studies were mediated by subjects' anticipation that their own behavior in social interactions could lead to embarrassing self-disclosures. An experiment was devised to test the hypothesis that open acknowledgement of a physical disability by a disabled individual would lead to greater liking, more favorable personality evaluations, less social and physical distancing as well as less anxiety, depression and aggression when the content of the interaction was expected to be relatively intimate but that acknowledgement would have no effect when a relatively neutral or nonintimate interaction was anticipated. All subjects viewed a videotaped interview of a handicapped confederate who either acknowledged or did not acknowledge his disability and were told that they would meet the confederate at a later point in the experiment to have an open-ended discussion. The topic for the discussion was described to subjects as either being neutral and potentially unrelated to disability or the topic given was directly relevant to the issue of physical disability. The results of this study confirmed that subjects would show more favorable evaluations of a disabled stimulus person when he acknowledged his disability but only when subjects perceived a significant potential for embarrassing self-disclosures. The predicted interaction effects of disability acknowledgement and situation intimacy were strongly supported for subjects' perceptions of the stimulus person but were only weakly supported for their expressions of social distancing from him. The predicted interaction effects of disability acknowledgement and situation intimacy were not supported for any measures of physical distancing. The impact of the stimulus person's self-description on subjects' moods was found to be independent of whether subjects expected to interact with him in an intimate or nonintimate setting. Subjects expressed greater aggression and depression when expecting to interact with a stimulus person who acknowledged his disability than when expecting to interact with a stimulus person who made no acknowledgement.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Psychology
