Helpful or harmful? The effect of a diagnostic label and its later retraction on person impressions.

Diagnostic labels for mental health conditions can inadvertently reinforce harmful stereotypes and exacerbate stigma. If a diagnosis is incorrect and a label is wrongly applied, this may negatively impact person impressions even if the inaccurate label is later corrected. This registered report examined this issue. Participants (N = 560) read a vignette about a hospital patient who was either diagnosed with schizophrenia, diagnosed with major depressive disorder, or not diagnosed with a mental health condition. The diagnostic labels were later retracted strongly, retracted weakly, or not retracted. Participants completed several stigma measures (desire for social distance, perceived dangerousness, and unpredictability), plus several inferential-reasoning measures that tested their reliance on the diagnostic label. As predicted, each mental health diagnosis elicited stigma, and influenced inferential reasoning. This effect was stronger for the schizophrenia diagnosis compared to the major depressive disorder diagnosis. Importantly, the diagnostic label continued to influence person judgments after a clear retraction (strong or weak), highlighting the limitations of corrections in reducing reliance on person-related misinformation and mental health stigma.

Impression formation stimuli: A corpus of behavior statements rated on morality, competence, informativeness, and believability.

To investigate impression formation, researchers tend to rely on statements that describe a person's behavior (e.g., "Alex ridicules people behind their backs"). These statements are presented to participants who then rate their impressions of the person. However, a corpus of behavior statements is costly to generate, and pre-existing corpora may be outdated and might not measure the dimension(s) of interest. The present study makes available a normed corpus of 160 contemporary behavior statements that were rated on 4 dimensions relevant to impression formation: morality, competence, informativeness, and believability. In addition, we show that the different dimensions are non-independent, exhibiting a range of linear and non-linear relationships, which may present a problem for past research. However, researchers interested in impression formation can control for these relationships (e.g., statistically) using the present corpus of behavior statements.