Acceptance and Commitment Training and stigma toward people with psychological disorders: Developing a new technology

The present dissertation, project attempted to develop and examine an acceptance-based group intervention (i.e., Acceptance and Commitment Training, ACT) for stigmatizing attitudes toward people with psychological disorders. Experiment 1 was a within-group study designed to develop and examine a 150-minute ACT intervention. Experiment 1 revealed that the ACT condition would likely reduce stigmatizing attitudes toward people with psychological disorders and the believability of stigmatizing thoughts. Experiment 2 was a randomized controlled trial (RCT), examining and comparing the effects of ACT and psychsocial education conditions on stigmatizing attitudes and the believability of stigmatizing thoughts. Results revealed that both treatment conditions significantly and equally reduced stigmatizing attitudes at post-treatment and the effect was generally maintained at 1-month follow-up. Similarly, both treatment conditions significantly and equally reduced the believability of stigmatizing thoughts at post-treatment and the reduction was maintained at follow-up. The believability of stigmatizing thought played a mediational role on the change in levels of stigmatizing attitudes in both conditions. In the ACT group, more change in stigmatizing attitudes (i.e., pretreatment vs. follow-up) was predicted by greater pretreatment levels of experiential avoidance (EA), suggesting an ACT-specific moderator of treatment effects. This relation was not found in the education group. When pre-treatment EA was added as a between subject variable, ACT performed better than the education condition with the high EA group, suggesting a unique moderator of change in ACT. Other results, conceptual questions, future directions in research and practice, and methodological imitations of the study are discussed.