Vignettes were used to examine the effect of labeling a person with two stigmatized illnesses, HIV disease and serious mental illness (schizophrenia). The additive model predicted that stigma associated with combined HIV and serious mental illness would resemble the simple sum of those for the two conditions. The discounting model predicted that the presence of serious mental illness would lead subjects to view the target individual as less responsible for infection, resulting in less stigmatization than given for HIV alone.
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