Impact of causal explanations for social anxiety disorder on stigma and treatment perceptions

Abstract

Background and aims: There is evidence to suggest that biogenetic explanations for symptoms of mental disorders have become increasingly popular. Research suggests that such explanations provokes mixed blessings: biological explanations may reduce blame but also encourage prognostic pessimism and promote perceptions of pharmacological treatment over psychotherapy. The goal of this study was to evaluate the impact of different causal explanations on social anxiety disorder.Method: About 205 adults completed an experiment where they read a vignette describing an individual with social anxiety disorder and were randomly assigned to a symptom explanation that was: (1) biological, (2) biopsychosocial, (3) psychosocial, or (4) no explanation.Results: The psychosocial condition yielded the highest perceived credibility and lowest attributions of blame. The biological condition promoted positive expectations for medication effectiveness compared to other conditions. Conditions did not differ on prognostic expectations.Conclusions: Calls attention to the risk of generalizing from previous research to mental disorders as a whole.