Department of Medicine, Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, WI 53226, USA.
BMC Public Health. 2013 Dec 3;13:1116. doi: 10.1186/1471-2458-13-1116.
Throughout history, people have soothed their fear of disease outbreaks by searching for someone to blame. Such was the case with the April 2009 H1N1 flu outbreak. Mexicans and other Latinos living in the US were quickly stigmatized by non-Latinos as carriers of the virus, partly because of news reports on the outbreak's alleged origin in Mexican pig farms.
In this exploratory study we examined the psychological processes of cue convergence and associative priming, through which many people likely conflated news of the H1N1 outbreak with pre-existing cognitive scripts that blamed Latino immigrants for a variety of social problems. We also used a transactional model of stress and coping to analyze the transcripts from five focus groups, in order to examine the ways in which a diverse collection of New England residents appraised the threat of H1N1, processed information about stereotypes and stigmas, and devised personal strategies to cope with these stressors.
Twelve themes emerged in the final wave of coding, with most of them appearing at distinctive points in the stress and coping trajectories of focus group participants. Primary and secondary appraisals were mostly stressful or negative, with participants born in the USA reporting more stressful responses than those who were not. Latino participants reported no stressful primary appraisals, but spoke much more often than Whites or Non-Hispanic Blacks about negative secondary appraisals. When interactions between participants dealt with stigmas regarding Latinos and H1N1, Latinos in our focus groups reported using far more negative coping strategies than Whites or Non-Hispanic Blacks. When discussions did not focus on stereotypes or stigmas, Latino participants spoke much more often about positive coping strategies compared to members of these same groups.
Participants in all five focus groups went through a similar process of stress and coping in response to the threat of H1N1, though individual responses varied by race and ethnicity. Stigmatization has often been common during pandemics, and public health and emergency preparedness practitioners can help to mitigate its impacts by developing interventions to address the social stressors that occur during outbreaks in highly-localized geographic regions.
纵观历史，人们通过寻找替罪羊来缓解对疾病爆发的恐惧。2009 年 4 月的 H1N1 流感爆发就是如此。在美国的墨西哥人和其他拉丁裔人很快被非拉丁裔人污名化为病毒携带者，部分原因是有关该疫情据称起源于墨西哥养猪场的新闻报道。
在这项探索性研究中，我们通过线索收敛和联想启动的心理过程来检验，许多人可能将 H1N1 疫情与指责拉丁裔移民引发各种社会问题的预先存在的认知脚本混为一谈。我们还使用压力和应对的交易模型来分析五个焦点小组的转录本，以研究各种新英格兰居民评估 H1N1 威胁、处理有关刻板印象和污名的信息以及制定个人应对这些压力源的策略的方式。
在编码的最后一波中出现了 12 个主题，其中大多数主题出现在焦点小组参与者的压力和应对轨迹的独特点上。主要和次要评估大多是有压力的或负面的，在美国出生的参与者比非美国出生的参与者报告的反应压力更大。拉丁裔参与者没有报告有压力的主要评估，但比白人或非西班牙裔黑人更频繁地谈论负面的次要评估。当参与者之间的互动涉及有关拉丁裔人和 H1N1 的污名时，焦点小组中的拉丁裔人比白人或非西班牙裔黑人报告使用更多的消极应对策略。当讨论不集中于刻板印象或污名时，拉丁裔参与者比来自同一群体的成员更频繁地谈论积极的应对策略。
所有五个焦点小组的参与者都经历了类似的应对 H1N1 威胁的压力和应对过程，尽管个人反应因种族和族裔而异。污名化在大流行期间经常发生，公共卫生和应急准备从业人员可以通过制定干预措施来解决在高度本地化的地理区域爆发期间发生的社会压力源，从而帮助减轻其影响。
