Journal
BRAIN IMPAIRMENT
Volume 18, Issue 3, Pages 299-309Publisher
CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS
DOI: 10.1017/BrImp.2017.13
Keywords
stroke; age; young stroke survivors; invisible disorders; attributions; rehabilitation; stigma; misconceptions
Categories
Ask authors/readers for more resources
With visible disabilities, observers tend to overgeneralise from the disability. In contrast, with invisible disabilities such as traumatic brain injury and stroke, observers often fail to allow for challenges resulting from the disability. Persons who have suffered a stroke claim that people misunderstand their symptoms and stigmatise them as a result of these symptoms. This misunderstanding, which happens particularly with young survivors of stroke, may reflect people's causal attributions for symptoms that follow a stroke. Using a scenario design, this crosssectional study examined whether people attribute ambiguous symptoms that may result from stroke to other causes (the stroke survivor's personality and age) and whether these attributions reflect the age of the stroke survivor. Participants (N = 120) read scenarios describing a male who was aged either 22, 72, or whose age was unstated and who showed four symptom changes: fatigue, depression, irritability and reduced friendships. For each symptom change, participants rated three causal attributions: the person's age, his personality and stroke. The age of the person in the scenario affected attributions; when the person in the scenario was 22, participants attributed his symptoms significantly more to his personality than to his age or stroke, whereas when he was 72, participants attributed his symptoms more to his age than to his personality or stroke and when his age was unstated, they attributed his symptoms equally to age, stroke and personality. Because misattributions for stroke symptoms hinder rehabilitation, therapy can target people's misattributions to enhance rehabilitation for survivors of stroke.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available