A rose is a rose: effects of label change, education, and sex on attitudes toward mental disabilities

Previous research on attitudes toward mental disabilities has shown a consistent, positive effect when accurate information re-garding mental disabilities (i.e., education) is made available. Con-versely, the effects of labelling and sex differences produced in-consistent results. This study approaches such attitudes in terms of the "cognitive miser " conception of schema use and examines whether changing labels applied to disabilities aiters attitudes to-ward an individual with a disability We examined the attitudes held by 168 university/college students employing a tesr-rrear-ment-retest design. The pretest involved compieting the Mental Retardation Attitude Inventory-Revised (MRAI-R). Then panici-pans read an educational vignette emphasizing the skills and daily activities of a person with a mental disability either mental retar-dation (MR) or attention deficit disorder (ADD). In approximately half the cases a novel label for the mental disability was presented