Laboratoire de Psychologie Cognitive, Aix-Marseille University and Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Marseille, France.
PLoS One. 2012;7(4):e34369. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0034369. Epub 2012 Apr 4.
Stigmatization is one of the greatest obstacles to the successful integration of people with Trisomy 21 (T21 or Down syndrome), the most frequent genetic disorder associated with intellectual disability. Research on attitudes and stereotypes toward these people still focuses on explicit measures subjected to social-desirability biases, and neglects how variability in facial stigmata influences attitudes and stereotyping.
METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: The participants were 165 adults including 55 young adult students, 55 non-student adults, and 55 professional caregivers working with intellectually disabled persons. They were faced with implicit association tests (IAT), a well-known technique whereby response latency is used to capture the relative strength with which some groups of people--here photographed faces of typically developing children and children with T21--are automatically (without conscious awareness) associated with positive versus negative attributes in memory. Each participant also rated the same photographed faces (consciously accessible evaluations). We provide the first evidence that the positive bias typically found in explicit judgments of children with T21 is smaller for those whose facial features are highly characteristic of this disorder, compared to their counterparts with less distinctive features and to typically developing children. We also show that this bias can coexist with negative evaluations at the implicit level (with large effect sizes), even among professional caregivers.
These findings support recent models of feature-based stereotyping, and more importantly show how crucial it is to go beyond explicit evaluations to estimate the true extent of stigmatization of intellectually disabled people.
污名化是唐氏综合征（T21 或唐氏儿）患者成功融入社会的最大障碍之一，T21 是最常见的与智力障碍相关的遗传疾病。针对人们对这些人的态度和刻板印象的研究仍然侧重于易受社会期望偏差影响的显性措施，而忽略了面部特征的变化如何影响态度和刻板印象。
方法/主要发现：参与者包括 165 名成年人，其中包括 55 名年轻成年学生、55 名非学生成年人和 55 名专业照顾智障人士的护理人员。他们接受了内隐联想测试（IAT），这是一种众所周知的技术，通过反应时来捕捉一些群体——这里是拍摄的正常发育儿童和 T21 儿童的照片——在记忆中自动（无意识）与积极或消极属性相关联的相对强度。每个参与者还对相同的照片进行了评分（有意识的可访问评估）。我们首次提供证据表明，与面部特征不太明显的 T21 儿童和正常发育的儿童相比，那些面部特征高度具有该疾病特征的 T21 儿童在显性判断中通常发现的积极偏见较小。我们还表明，即使在专业护理人员中，这种偏见也可以与隐性水平上的负面评价共存（具有较大的效应量）。
这些发现支持基于特征的刻板印象的最新模型，更重要的是表明，超越显性评估来估计智障人士真正的污名化程度是至关重要的。
