Sometimes more competent, but always less warm: Perceptions of biologically oriented mental-health clinicians
Matthew S Lebowitz,
Woo-kyoung Ahn and
Kathleen Oltman
International Journal of Social Psychiatry, 2015, vol. 61, issue 7, 668-676
Abstract:
Background and aims: Biological conceptualizations of psychopathology are ascendant, including among mental-health clinicians. However, it is unknown how this might affect people’s perceptions of clinicians, which in turn could have considerable public-health implications. The present studies sought to address this issue. Methods: In the present research, participants imagined that they or their loved ones were suffering from a mental disorder and then rated their perceptions of one clinician espousing the view that ‘mental disorders are brain diseases’ and another describing them as ‘disorders of thoughts and emotions’. Results: Biologically oriented clinicians were perceived as more competent and effective only when the disorder in question was judged to be biologically caused. Otherwise, there was no significant difference in perceived competence, and biologically oriented clinicians were rated less effective. Regardless, all participants perceived the biologically oriented clinician as significantly less warm on average than the psychosocially oriented clinician. Conclusion: These findings may have important clinical implications for the crucial therapeutic alliance between therapists and patients.
Keywords: Causal explanations; mental disorders; therapeutic alliance; social perception; warmth; competence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0020764015573086 (text/html)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:socpsy:v:61:y:2015:i:7:p:668-676
DOI: 10.1177/0020764015573086
Access Statistics for this article
More articles in International Journal of Social Psychiatry
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().