Dogmatism and Opinions about Mental Illness
- 1 June 1973
- journal article
- Published by SAGE Publications in Psychological Reports
- Vol. 32 (3_suppl) , 1283-1290
- https://doi.org/10.2466/pr0.1973.32.3c.1283
Abstract
Opinions about mental illness were studied among a group of introductory psychology students categorized on the basis of their dogmatism. 3 scales were developed to measure belief aspects of opinions concerning the specific categories of homosexual and suicide and the general category of mental illness. Results indicated that highly dogmatic persons tended to hold stereotypical beliefs concerning all categories with a greater intensity than low-dogmatic persons. In addition, both high- and low-dogmatic Ss did not differentiate between suicide and mental illness but did differentiate homosexuality from both these categories. On purely evaluative dimensions of a semantic differential high-dogmatics evaluated homosexuals most negatively while low-dogmatics evaluated homosexuals least negatively. The implications of these data for studies regarding opinions about mental illness are discussed as are their importance for dogmatism theory.Keywords
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