Abstracts

Rationale: It is still unclear if people with epilepsy (PWE) have self-stigma or not, while, previous reports said that people have social stigma toward epilepsy in general. Explicit attitudes which are often measured via self-report questionnaires are consciously accessible and controllable, and thus are subject to bias. In contrast, the implicit association test (IAT, Greenwald et al. 1998) has been developed to assess aspects of cognition such as implicit attitudes and implicit personality traits. The IAT is a computerized reaction time task that measures to what extent two target categories are associated with two attribute categories. We assumed that PWE have stronger implicit self-stigma compared to healthy participants due to their experience. The aim of this study is to investigate the difference of implicit stigma toward epilepsy between PWE and healthy control subjects, and to investigate the self-stigma of PWE using the IAT to assess implicit attitudes. Methods: Sixteen PWE and 39 healthy students were recruited. Participants were instructed to sort stimulus words as fast as possible to the appropriate superordinate category using the L or the A on a keyboard. We investigated two types of IAT, both of which used "target categories" of epilepsy and diabetes. In the first IAT, the attribute categories were refusal and reception, while in the second IAT, the attribute categories were bad and good. In general, responses tend to be faster when the two categories that share a response key in the combined phases are somehow associated than when they are not. We compared the key reaction time as performance which allowed us to calculate an IAT effect. Mean reaction times on trials during where the epilepsy cues shared the response key with reception/good were subtracted from mean reaction times on trials during which the epilepsy cues shared the response key with refusal/bad. A positive IAT effect reflects a relatively strong positive association between epilepsy and refusal/bad, a negative IAT effect reflects a relatively strong positive association between epilepsy and reception/good. We used a one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) to assess for statistical association. Results: An ANOVA examining the IAT effects of first IAT revealed that the IAT effect of PWE was significantly more negative than that of healthy control subjects. In other words, PWE answered isolation smaller than healthy participants answered. An ANOVA examining the IAT effects of second IAT revealed that the IAT effect of PWE was significantly negative than that of healthy control subjects, that showed PWE answered the stigma toward epilepsy smaller than healthy participants answered. Conclusions: The present study suggests that the association between epilepsy and refusal was significantly weaker in PWE than in healthy control subjects. Against our assumption, this study did not showed stronger self-stigma of PWE than healthy participants. It is known that stigma is stronger toward unknown people or things, things that can be a menace in future, or people or things that are ‘out from the group'.