Your hypothetical LIVIN intervention. Imagine that you design a new online LIVIN intervention   that aims to reduce stereotyping of individuals living with schizophrenia as dangerous.  The intervention you design includes elements of both education and contact. Psychoeducation and contact interventions are popular approaches to reducing stigma about mental ill-health.

Psychoeducation refers to education about mental health and illness, its causes, treatments and recovery.  It is theorised that psychoeducation can decrease stigma by correcting harmful and misled stereotypes about mental illness through the provision of correct information.  Contact interventions involve having contact with someone living with mental health issues either face-to- face, or remotely through online, tv or radio.  The theorised mechanism of change is that the positive experience of observing or interacting with someone with lived experience of mental ill- health again challenges myths and stereotypes, and cultivates empathy.

A helpful note on stereotyping and formation impressions of other people

When considering stereotyping as a core mechanism involved in public stigmatisation of mental ill- health, it is important to recognise that this process is a natural and unavoidable social psychological heuristic function.  Stereotyping provides individuals with an efficient means to form impressions and expectations of others, and to support social decision making in the face of the    ongoing procession of people that we encounter in everyday life.

The process of impression formation and stereotyping commences with observation of a social stimulus – another person and their characteristic features both remarkable and not.

Categorisation of the target follows, whereby impression formation focusses on the categories to

which a target belongs rather than on that target’s unique attributes.  Categorisation leads to

stereotype activation, which is not necessarily automatic, and can be moderated by factors such as available attentional resources, motivational biases, and situational context.  This stereotype activation is thought to subsequently affect perception of individuals at the characterisation phase of impression formation, wherein activated stereotyped can influence our appraisal of a target’s characteristics and behaviour in self-fulfilling ways, and may influence what information about the   target is prospectively attended to and encoded such that stereotypes are confirmed. Stereotypes may be subsequently corrected and updated in the presence of disconfirming evidence.

Imagine that your new LIVIN intervention provides detailed, disconfirming psychoeducation in terms of theory, evidence and statistics that demonstrate that people living with schizophrenia are not inherently dangerous or violent and are more likely to be victims of violence that perpetrators.

The presenters of this information in your intervention are PhD-qualified experts in the field.

Likewise, imagine that the contact aspect of your new online intervention provides viewers with an opportunity to observe videos of people living with schizophrenia telling their stories.  Observing these people with lived experience demonstrates that they are clearly not dangerous.  The videos are filmed in a professional studio and the final production is very high quality.  The overall visual  design of the intervention has also been professionally designed to provide a very impressive experience.

The Elaboration Likelihood Model of Persuasion

Your new LIVIN intervention aims to change people’s attitudes about schizophrenia. One social

psychological theory, the Elaboration Likelihood Model (Cacioppo et al., 1986), suggests that

your intervention may change people’s attitudes about schizophrenia being a dangerous condition in two ways: the central and the peripheral route.  In brief, through the central route, individuals’   attitudes may be changed by consideration of the convincing, logical information presented in your intervention, such as facts and figures about what schizophrenia is, and how people living with the condition are not inherently dangerous.  Through the peripheral route, your intervention may work  not because of the logical information presented but by other positive aspects of the intervention,   such as the fact that it is visually appealing, professionally produced, and that accounts of

schizophrenia were presented by experts either through profession or through lived experience.  If  you find that your trial does work, then Elaboration Likelihood Model of persuasion can explain how

it may work.  You should summarise this theoretical approach to explaining the intervention effect to be tested in your introduction and then also explain the implications of your results for the

Elaboration Likelihood Model in your discussion.

Your intervention trial

Your intervention trial aims to address the following research question: Is an online hybrid educational and contact-based intervention effective in reducing stereotypes of dangerousness about schizophrenia?

Imagine that to test your new LIVIN online contact and educational intervention, you recruit a

sample of people from the public.  In total, 772 participants join your study.  You decide to measure their level of endorsement of dangerousness stereotypes by using an adapted version of a

questionnaire called the ‘Dangerousness Scale’ (Penn et al, 1994).  You can see a copy of the original scale below in Figure 1. For your trial, you adapt the survey wording to correspond to   schizophrenia specifically rather than mental illness generally and the adapted version of the    survey is provided below.

In conducting your trial, you firstly ask participants to complete this scale before they complete

your intervention.  Secondly, participants undertake and complete the intervention.  Thirdly, you asked participants to complete the Dangerousness Scale again directly after completing the

intervention. Because you’re a clever psychologist, you know that you can draw inferences about the effectiveness of your LIVIN online psychoeducation and contact trial by comparing the mean  (average) pre-intervention (before) and post-intervention (after) scores for your participants.

Practically, you will do this by observing if the post-intervention mean score is lower than the pre-

intervention mean score.  If it is, this means that the degree to which participants stereotype

schizophrenia as violent has reduced after the intervention. Such a finding would suggest that the   intervention is effective.  Any other pattern of results would not suggest the intervention is effective.

You should make and present a bar chart in Microsoft Excel or another similar program based

upon the pre-intervention and post-intervention group mean scores presented in Table 1. In

addition to Table 1, you can see the accompanying spreadsheet for further details but my (Chris) strong advice is not to get distracted by all the data in that spreadsheet.  It is the pre-intervention and post-intervention means scores that are important.

Table 1.  Mean pre-intervention and post-intervention scores on the Dangerousness Scale for your N = 772 participants.

Figure 1. Dangerousness Scale (Penn et al., 1994)

Figure 1 above shows the original Dangerousness Scale, just for your reference.  Your adapted version of the dangerousness scale used the same scaled response options but the questions   were adapted to be specifically reference schizophrenia as follows:

1. If a group of people with schizophrenia lived nearby, I would not allow my children to go to the movie theatre alone.

2. If a person with schizophrenia applied for a teaching position at a grade school and was qualified for the job, I would recommend hiring them.

3. One important thing about people with schizophrenia is that you cannot tell what they will do from one minute to the next.

4. If I know a person has schizophrenia, I will be less likely to trust them.

5. The main purpose of mental hospitals should be to protect the public from people with schizophrenia.

6. If a person with schizophrenia lived nearby, I would not hesitate to allow young children under my care on the sidewalk.

7. Although some people with schizophrenia may seem alright, it is dangerous to forget for a moment that they are mentally ill.

8. There should be a law forbidding people with schizophrenia the right to obtain a hunting license.

Starting Reading

The core starting readings for this assignment are:

1. Penn, D. L., Guynan, K., Daily, T., Spaulding, W. D., Garbin, C. P., & Sullivan, M. (1994).

Dispelling the stigma of schizophrenia: What sort of information is best? Schizophrenia Bulletin,

20(3), 567–578. https://doi.org/10.1093/schbul/20.3.567

Note: This paper is the original from which the Dangerousness Scale comes

2. Penn, D. L., Kommana, S., Mansfield, M., & Link, B. G. (1999). Dispelling the stigma of

schizophrenia: II. The impact of information on dangerousness. Schizophrenia Bulletin, 25(3), 437–

446. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.schbul.a033391

Note: A seminal paper on educational intervention to reduce dangerousness stereotyping of

individuals with schizophrenia.

3. Cacioppo, J. T., Petty, R. E., Kao, C. F., & Rodriguez, R. (1986). Central and peripheral routes  to persuasion: An individual difference perspective. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,

51(5), 1032– 1043. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.51.5.1032

Note: A seminal paper on the Elaboration Likelihood Model of persuasion and attitude change.

4. Kosyluk, K. A., Al-Khouja, M., Bink, A., Buchholz, B., Ellefson, S., Fokuo, K., ... & Powell, K.   (2016). Challenging the stigma of mental illness among college students. Journal of Adolescent

Health, 59(3), 325-331.

Note: This is of course the standard starting reading.  You have probably already read it.  It is a

good starting reading to get thinking about intervening for stigma about mental ill-health.

5. Chapter 24 “ Strategies to Reduce Mental Illness Stigma” (Nicolas Rsch and Ziyan Xu) of the  book “The Stigma of Mental Illness – End of The Story?”.  This book is available to borrow online

through the library.  The complete reference is: Gaebel, W., Rössler, W., & Sartorius, N.

(2016). The Stigma of Mental Illness -- End of The Story? Springer.

Note: Chapter 24 provides a good overview of what works to reduce stigma about mental health

issues.  You should pay particular attention to the sections on educational and contact-based

interventions for mental illness stigma.

Notes on writing a lab report

We will give you plenty of support as you commence on your lab report writing journey.  Indeed,

the first practical class will very much focus on exploring the lab report and getting started.  There are also a suite of instructional modules on how to write a lab report that I have provided on

Canvas.  This paper shares many of the features of a lab report and you will see that I have made some basic commentary to draw your attention to certain aspects of the report, its structure and

style.

There is a very specific way to write a lab report.  In many respects, this makes your task easier than it may be if you had to start from scratch with no framework.  Lab reports have specific

sections, each of which are dedicated to doing a certain thing.  Learning to write in this formulaic way can be uncomfortable at first and particularly so if you have a creative writing background.

The marking criteria provided below will be a useful guide, however, and you should refer to them to inform your approach.  Let’s look at the basic format of a lab report …

1. Title. The title of the report should be focused and succinct. Ensure that the title captures the main topic by including only essential terms, such as the variables of study.

* Abstract. The abstract is a summary of the entire report. It provides a preview of the report and can encourage the reader to go on to read the entire report. There is no abstract required for

your MBB2 lab report. I want you to leave this out. I mention this here just so that you know it is a thing that is sometimes required, but that I am not asking you to do it. So, nada, zilch, zero,

absence of …no abstract, please.

2. Introduction. This is where you will introduce your topic and establish its importance.  You will  introduce the theoretical foundation for your work (the Elaboration Likelihood Model) and provide a

literature review that describes relevant previous work such as that of Penn et al (1999) and

others. In doing so, you will be building a case for the current study. At the end of the introduction, you will formally state your aim and hypothesis for the study.  Note that for this assignment, you

should state one hypothesis only.  This hypothesis should be a prediction about what you think will happen to the level of dangerousness stereotyping use in your sample after they have completed   your new LIVIN trial in comparison to the baseline measurement taken before the intervention.

3. Method. We will provide you with the method section for your lab report for your interest

only.  This means that there is nothing you need to do in this respect – there is no method

section required for this report - and therefore, there are no marks to be obtained for a

method section. Under other circumstances, the method section is where you describe the

demographic characteristics of the sample of participants who were involved in the study, and go on to describe the survey that was used and the procedure that was undertaken. You can also

describe how analysis of the data was approached.

One thing that you will be able to do is consider the method section that is provided to you in the  interpretation of your findings that you write up in your discussion section.  For example, you may write about your thoughts on the demographic makeup of our sample and its implications for generalizability and comparison to previous research.

4. Results. In the results section, you will simply report the findings of the study.  That’s it.  No

more.  This can feel uncomfortable in that you are not providing interpretation at the point of

reporting the results.  Don’t worry though, you will have your opportunity to interpret the results in good time.

5. Discussion. Your discussion section should open by reorienting the reader to the aim of the study and providing an explicit statement of support (or not) for the hypothesis based on your

findings.  You would then move on to interpret the current findings in relation to the previous

literature that you covered in the literature review section of your introduction.  You could talk about whether or not your findings were in line with previous ones.  If they are not in line, then you could   try to account for why this may be.  You could also relate your findings to the Elaboration

Likelihood Model theory that you introduced in the introduction.  You would go on to acknowledge   limitations of your study in a measured way, and wind up by summarizing your study and providing logical suggestions for future directions in this avenue of research.

6. References. You will need to provide a full reference list that acknowledge each cited paper in  the lab report.  Speaking of referencing and citation, always make sure you are giving credit where it is due.  See my video on this in the Assignment section of Canvas.

Submission of work

The MSPS Undergraduate and Graduate Diploma Student Manual (https://go.unimelb.edu.au/45pi) details assessment policies and procedures. It includes information about extensions, word counts, late penalties, and submission requirements. Please read this document carefully. Additionally, if

you have not already done so, visit the University academic integrity website to learn about your responsibilities in maintaining academic integrity (https://go.unimelb.edu.au/8nw6).  Please also visit our Academic Integrity module on Canvas to learn about how to avoid plagiarism.  The

University of Melbourne treats plagiarism and the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the creation of assignments as academic misconduct.  The University has invested in plagiarism and AI detection software in Canvas.  It is therefore in your best interest to develop yourself scholastically in an

authentic way through this assignment and avoid plagiarism and AI altogether.

Assessment Criteria