1. The Malleability of Attitudes: Combining Imagined Social Contact with Implicit Attitude Feedback
Pennington, C. R., Campbell, C., Monk, R. L., & Heim, D. (in review)
PhD Candidate & Graduate Teaching Assistant
Edge Hill University

2. Stigmatised Attitudes
Stigmatised attitudes towards individuals with a mental illness have heightened over the past 30 years.
70-80% of the general public hold the belief that individuals with a mental health disorder are dangerous and unpredictable (Crisp et al. 2000; Pescosolido et al. 1999).
At 14 years of age, children can identify 250 negative labels related to mental ill-health (Rose et al. 2007).

3. Explicit vs. Implicit Attitudes
Explicit Attitudes
Implicit Attitudes
Intentional
Unintentional
Controlled
Automatic
Direct Measurement
Indirect Measurement(?)
Subject to presentational motives
Cannot be manipulated by social desirability
First of all, I would like to explain the difference between explicit and implicit attitudes.
Explicit attitudes are intentional and of conscious control. Participants are able to report what they believe on a questionnaire. However, such measures are vulnerable to self-presentational motives. For example, participants may conceal their attitudes in order to appear non-prejudice. Such responses may also be shaped by the demand characteristics of a given situation.
Implicit measures, on the other hand, reveal introspectively unidentified traces of past experience that mediate favourable or unfavourable feeling, thought, or action toward social objects” (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995, p.5), and can be unintentionally activated by the mere presence of attitude stimuli (Turner & Crisp, 2010). Accordingly, implicit measures are employed to display an extensive range of socially significant associative structures (Greenwald, McGhee & Schwartz, 1998).
The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is the most widely used implicit measure. The IAT is a computerised task which measures the strength of persons’ automatic associations between mental representations of concepts in memory (Bergh, Akrami, & Ekehammar, 2012). Specifically, participants are asked to categorise various attitude objects with evaluative attributes using two computer response keys (Greenwald, Nosek & Banaji, 2003). Using a measure of response latencies, the IAT posits that it should be quicker to map two concepts onto a single response when those two concepts are associated in memory, compared to when the concepts are not associated in memory (Houwer, 2002).
Measured by explicit measures:
Measured by implicit measures:
Self-Reports
Implicit Association Test (IAT)
Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP)

4. Remedial Strategies
Interventions to ameliorate stigmatised attitudes have proliferated in recent years
Heavy focus on changing explicit attitudes in isolation (Wilson et al. 2000).
Implicit Attitude Feedback reduced explicit ostracising attitudes (Menatti et al. in press):
Imagined Social Contact (ISC) can reduce explicit stigmatising attitudes towards individuals with schizophrenia (Stathi et al. 2012). Self-presentational motives?
Interventions aiming to ameliorate such negative stigmatising attitudes have proliferated in recent years.
For instance, employing the IAT, Menatti et al. (in press) demonstrated that implicit attitude feedback or participation in an implicit attitude test successfully reduced explicit stigmatised attitudes towards mental illness. Similarly, Stathi et al. (2012) revealed that imagined social contact (ISC; Crisp & Turner, 2009) reduced explicit ostracising attitudes towards individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia. Here, participants who imagined a positive interaction formed greater intentions to engage in future interactions with individuals diagnosed with a mental illness in general (ibid). Given that public stigma adversely influences an individual’s acceptance of psychiatric diagnosis (Dinos, Stevens, Serfaty, Weich, & King, 2004), and may hinder timely treatment and recovery (Corrigan, 2004; Rüsch, Angermeyer, & Corrigan, 2005), developing interventions to reduce negative mental health-related attitudes is important. Nevertheless, by examining explicit stigmatising attitudes in isolation, these studies are potentially vulnerable to self-presentational motives (Rydell & McConnell, 2006). In other words, as individuals are aware of their explicit attitudes (Cullen, Barnes-Holmes, Barnes-Holmes, & Stewart, 2009), it is conceivable that these may be shaped by social desirability (Schwarz, 1999).

5. The Current Study
Interventions aiming to ameliorate negative attitudes should focus on both explicit and implicit
Research has shown separately the effectiveness of implicit attitude feedback and imagined social contact
Research question: Does combining imagined social contact with implicit attitude feedback reduce both implicit and explicit negative attitudes towards individuals with a mental illness?
Hypothesis: We postulate that combining ISC with implicit attitude feedback may be a particularly effective means of bringing about attitude change
Looking at the literature, a significant gap had emerged. Interventions to reduce stigmatising attitudes towards individuals with a mental illness focused greatly on changing explicit attitudes. Yet, interventions to change implicit attitudes remain predominantly neglected.
Again, those who employ implicit attitude change measures tend to neglect explicit attitudes.
We argue that interventions aiming to ameliorate negative attitudes towards stigmatised out-groups should focus on both explicit and implicit attitudes.
Frailties of introspection and how little control individuals have over their own thoughts- implicit feedback may therefore be the key to making individuals consciously aware of their negative stigmatising thoughts.

6. Method
4 Experimental Conditions: ISC with and without implicit feedback and IRAP alone with and without feedback.
“I would like you to take a minute to imagine yourself meeting a mentally ill individual for the first time. Imagine that the encounter is positive, relaxed and comfortable”. (Crisp & Turner, 2009).
Counterbalanced: Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP) and the Community Attitudes Towards the Mentally Ill Scale (CAMI-SR; Taylor & Dear, 1981).
Implicit and explicit attitudes re-examined after a 24 hour gap in experimental testing.
IRAP vs. IAT?
A positive imagined social contact situation was chosen as past research has demonstrated that neutral imagined contact can have negative effects.
IAT provides an indirect, relative associative strength, which creates a lack of precision in determining the directional nature of attitudes under study.
IAT focuses on associations rather than relations among stimuli, and as such they provide only an indirect measure of beliefs. IAT effects do not reflect the nature of directionality of an association between concepts, they only reflect a strength of an association. (Greenwald et al. 1998).
A key limitation to the IAT, therefore, is that it cannot readily assess the nature or directionality of an association (i.e. a relation), and furthermore it cannot be used to assess a complex structure of directional associations (i.e. a relational network). In order to measure attitudes to individual stimuli, therefore, a non-relative measure is required. The theoretical basis of the IRAP as a procedure and effect, is found in relational frame theory, which defines the core units of human language and cognition not as associations, per se, but as derived from stimulus relations (Hayes, Barnes-Holmes, & Roche, 2001). Greater incremental predictive validity compared to the IAT and strong correlations to explicit measures (Barnes-Holmes, Waldron….)

7. PHYSICALLY ILL PERSON
HARMLESS
Select ‘D’ for Select ‘K’ for Similar Opposite
Harmless/Harmless
Consistent
Inconsistent
PHYSICALLY ILL PERSON
DANGEROUS
Select ‘D’ for Select ‘K’ for Similar Opposite
Harmless/Dangerous
Consistent
Inconsistent
MENTALLY ILL PERSON
HARMLESS
Select ‘D’ for Select ‘K’ for Similar Opposite
Dangerous/Harmless
Consistent
Inconsistent
MENTALLY ILL PERSON
DANGEROUS
Select ‘D’ for Select ‘K’ for Similar Opposite
Dangerous/Dangerous
Consistent
Inconsistent
Have to have a control to match it too, so we chose individuals with a physical illness, in line with previous research.

8. Results
Physically ill person trials were non significant- individuals held a neutral implicit attitude, so the results of this trial type will not be explained in more detail.
ISC was effective at changing individuals implicit attitudes towards individuals with a mental illness.
However, combining ISC with implicit attitude feedback revealed the greatest effect, suggesting that this may be an effective intervention to lessen stigmatised attitudes towards individuals with a mental illness.

9. Results Across phase 1 and phase 2 of the experiment.
Imagined contact with feedback was successful at increasing positive implicit attitudes towards individuals with a mental illness in both time 1 and time 2.
Individuals in the imagined contact without feedback held neutral attitudes at time one, but these attitudes increased positively in time 2.

10. Discussion
Making individuals aware of their implicit attitudes may act as a cue for control (Monteith et al. 2002).
Explicit and implicit attitudes did not correlate: Model of dual attitudes (Wilson et al. 2002).
New associations may have occurred in memory (Gawronski & LeBel, 2008).
Interventions need to target both implicit and explicit attitudes.
Imagined social contact combined with implicit attitude feedback may be an effective means of reducing stigmatised attitudes.
Cue for control: may increase self-regulatory behaviour and reduce stereotypical attitudes. Individuals realise the way they think and can exert effort to change their implicit attitudes.
In line with previous research (Cullen et al. 2009), participants explicit and implicit attitudes did not correlate. May not have had the cognitive capacity to retrieve the explicit attitude.
Alternatively, the categorisation of an attitude object with positive or negative evaluative terms may have created a new automatic association in memory and individuals cannot report this explicitly.
Overall then, this research demonstrates that interventions need to be targeted to both implicit and explicit attitude change. The current study provides evidence for the effectiveness of ISC combined with implicit feedback as an intervention to bring about implicit attitude change. Provides evidence for a new theory (2014) which states that individuals have two sub-systems- one implicit and one explicit.

11. Thank you for listening.