Abstracts

Rationale: The care of epilepsy includes not only proper diagnosis and treatment, but also the management of public attitude toward epilepsy, including stigma, which affects patients' quality of life. The implicit association test (IAT, Greenwald et al. 1998) was developed to assess implicit attitudes and implicit personality traits that are not captured by self-report measures of attitudes and personality. The IAT is a word sorting task that measures the strength of associations between concepts by comparing reaction times. The underlying assumption of the IAT is that if two categories are highly associated, the sorting will be faster when the two associated categories share the same response key than when they share different response keys. A few serious car accidents occurred in Japan in 2011 and 2012, which were caused by persons with epilepsy and resulted in several pedestrian fatalities in each accident. These traffic accidents were extensively and repeatedly reported by the media (television, newspapers, magazines and websites). The aim of this study is to examine differences in implicit stigma towards epilepsy before and after these traffic accidents. Methods: Thirty-nine students were recruited for this study from the medical university in 2010, and 44 students were recruited in 2013. All participants completed a set of questionnaires and the IAT. The IAT used two pairs of categories: one about chronic disease (epilepsy and hypertension), and the other about safety (safety and danger). Each category included five stimulus words for a total of 20 words; for instance, ‘brain function, EEG, anti-epileptic drug, seizure and convulsion' for the epilepsy category. Two category labels were displayed on the left-hand and right-hand sides of a computer screen. For example, epilepsy and danger were displayed on the left side, and hypertension and safety were displayed on the right side. One of the 20 stimulus words was displayed in the center of the computer screen during each trial. Participants were told that they would be required to make a series of category judgments if the words belonged in right or left categories and press the right or left key. We measured and compared the reaction times for pressing the keys. The IAT effect for each participant was computed by subtracting the mean latency for the trials that implicitly paired ‘epilepsy & danger' and ‘hypertension & safety' from the mean latency for the trials that implicitly paired ‘epilepsy & safety' and ‘hypertension & danger'. If epilepsy and danger were highly associated compared with hypertension and danger for a participant, the IAT effect would yield a higher score. Results: There was no significant IAT effect in 2010; however, there was significant IAT effect in 2013. Conclusions: An implicit association between epilepsy and danger was observed in 2013, which was not observed in 2010. There is a possibility that a simplistic and hasty connection between epilepsy and the traffic accidents was made as a result of the repeated reports about traffic accidents.