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This page is an AI-assisted Turkish summary of the study presented at the 26th World Congress of Psychiatry. The study belongs to the presenting authors; please refer to the original source when citing it.

EV1282

A novel fMRI-compatible paradigm for investigating mental illness stigma: Initial validation of the 'Save Your Soul' task

A NOVEL FMRI-COMPATIBLE PARADIGM TO STUDY MENTAL ILLNESS STIGMA: INITIAL VALIDATION OF THE “SAVE YOUR SOUL” TASK

A gamified cooperation task that can be administered during fMRI demonstrated strong psychometric properties; participants rated characters with mental illness as less warm and less competent and cooperated with them less often.

Because self-report measures often fail to capture behavioral manifestations of stigma, this study aimed to examine the psychometric properties of a novel fMRI-compatible behavioral paradigm measuring perceptions related to the Stereotype Content Model (SCM) and decisions to cooperate with people with physical illness (PI) and mental illness (MI). Sixty adults from the general population (mean age 36.18 ± 11.12 years; 50% women) completed a gamified cooperation task adapted from the prisoner's dilemma during fMRI. In a time-pressured scenario, they decided whether to cooperate with or escape alone from 60 characters described by their name, age, hobby, and health status. They then rated all characters on warmth and competence and completed the Community Attitudes toward Mental Illness (CAMI) scale. From the 60 ratings for each dimension, 16 items, comprising 4 items per diagnosis, were selected based on inter-item correlations (r < 0.80) and subjected to exploratory factor analysis (EFA). The analysis yielded two factors, PI and MI, accounting for 54.9% of the variance in warmth and 52.4% in competence. Cronbach's alpha values ranged from 0.82 to 0.89, with values of 0.88 for decisions to cooperate with PI characters and 0.84 for decisions involving MI characters. Ratings correlated with cooperation with the corresponding characters (r = 0.31 to 0.56; all p < 0.05). Participants rated MI characters as significantly less warm (t(59) = -5.04) and less competent (t(59) = -3.67) than PI characters and cooperated with them less often (t(59) = -4.00; all p < 0.01). Warmth predicted cooperation with MI characters (β = 0.49; p = 0.03; R² = 0.43), whereas the model for PI was not significant. CAMI scores correlated with competence ratings of MI characters (r = -0.30) and cooperation with characters diagnosed with schizophrenia (r = -0.26; all p < 0.05). The authors concluded that the paradigm has strong and promising psychometric properties for measuring behavioral stigma during fMRI and enables behavioral data to be combined with neuroimaging.

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