@article{2022:sukalla:identifica,
title = {Identification with similar others sharing their experience of coping with depression and its effects on stigmatization and prosocial intentions},
year = {2022},
note = {Addressing the high prevalence of depression among university students
and the need to motivate professional help seeking, we examine whether
recovery stories featuring a similar - compared to a dissimilar -
person sharing their personal experience of coping with depression
will reduce stigmatization (attitudes, social distance, prosocial
intentions) and the self-stigma of help seeking as mediated by
perceived similarity and identification. We conducted a one-factorial
between-subject experiment to test the effects of lifestyle similarity
on stigmatization and self-stigma of help seeking. 169 students (74.6%
female; Mage = 23.5, SD = 3.5) were randomly assigned to read either a
recovery story about a similar or dissimilar author’s reflections on
their experience of coping with depression or a control story.
Contrary to expectations, recovery stories did not reduce
stigmatization nor the self-stigma of help seeking, irrespective of
whether they were told by a similar or dissimilar person. However, a
significant indirect effect on prosocial intentions through perceived
similarity and identification as well as several interesting
exploratory results point to potential beneficial and detrimental
effects of recovery stories and similarity that should be explored in
future research.},
journal = {SCM Studies in Communication and Media},
pages = {169--185},
author = { and Sukalla, Freya and Krack, Ina and Seibert, Daniel and Paeth, Ludwig and Frank, Olga and Preißler, Ronja and Block, Philip Matias},
volume = {11},
number = {1}
}