Effect Of Perceived Discrimination On Social Alienation Of Disabled And The Psychological Mechanism

Disabled’s social alienation is a worldwide public problem. It refers to an automaticallalienation and isolation of the individual psychology and behavior. Understanding the antecedentsof social alienation is the precursor of any successful prevention and intervention. A large body ofliterature shows that social alienation will lead to a lots of adjustment problems (e.g. anxiety,loneliness). Similarly, researches have indicated that perceived discrimination can also causebehavioral and psychological problems of the disabled (e.g. avoidance). And some evidences showthat self-esteem also plays the role of mediator between perceived discrimination and anxiety.However, there are inadequate researches on the relationships among perceived discrimination,self-esteem and social alienation. Moreover, previous studies indicated that the special group (lowself-esteem and high anxious) are very sensitive to threatening information, Further, it is easier forthem to be engaged in threatening information, after which they find it hard to shift their attentionto other kinds of information. Nevertheless, not many literatures have been conducted todemonstrate the attention bias of the disabled.Study1adopted questionnaires to investigate the mediator and moderator effects of self-esteem on the relationship between stigma perception and social alienation of the disabled.Analysis of variance showed that (1) in the social anxiety and loneliness evaluations, there aresignificant differences in the gender and disabled type. The female and the congenital disabilitygained the higher scores. Comparing to the married, unmarried handicapped person prefers toavoid, feels more anxious and loneliness in social situation;(2) People with inheritable disabilitiesare more sensitive to discrimination. And marital variable is also an influencing factor, thus theunmarried have the lower scores. Multiple regression analyses revealed the following results:(3)Self-esteem partially mediated the relationship between stigma perception and social avoidance,social anxiety and loneliness;(4) Self-esteem moderated the relationship between stigmaperception and social avoidance, but not on social anxiety and loneliness.Study2designed two experiments according to the parading “stroop task” and “odd-one-out-search task” to test whether disabled individuals are more vigilant to threats information or whetherit is hard to distract their attention from the threat. The results revealed the following:(1)Compared with the normal person, disabled individuals showed attention bias to negative words;(2)Disabled individuals were found to be more susceptible to the angry face than the normal person. However, as compared to the disabled, it was more susceptible to the happy face of the normalperson;(3) There was no significant difference between the disabled and normal person inattentional maintenance to happy and angry faces. It can be concluded that disabled individualswere more attention-sensitive to threatening information, but they were easy to disengage theirattention from threatening information.