Public and self-stigmas have been implicated as factors in the underutilization of individual counseling. However, group counseling is also underutilized, and yet scholars know very little about the role of different types of stigma on attitudes toward seeking group counseling. Therefore, the current study examined the relationships between public and self-stigma and attitudes toward group counseling among a sample of 491 U.S. college students. Results of structural equation modeling analyses indicated that public stigma is internalized as self-stigma and self-stigma is then negatively related to attitudes toward group counseling. Furthermore, public stigma and self-stigma explained 52% of the variance in attitudes toward seeking help.

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The study examined public and self-stigma and their association with attitudes and intentions to seek psychological help in regard to both individual and group treatment as well as to various subgroups, including gender, ethnicity, educational orientation, level of religion, and age. Undergraduate students (N=307) in three universities in Israel participated in the study. Results partly confirmed the model for both individual and group therapy: Self-stigma was related to attitudes and intentions to seek help. However, public stigma was not related to self-stigma. Importantly, some differences were also found among the various subgroups, and the model, which takes into account the different subgroups, looks somewhat different for individual and group therapy.

Researchers have found that the stigma associated with seeking therapy--particularly self-stigma--can inhibit the use of psychological services. Yet, most of the research on self-stigma has been conducted in the United States. This is a considerable limitation, as the role of self-stigma in the help-seeking process may vary across cultural groups. However, to examine cross-cultural variations, researchers must first develop culturally valid scales. Therefore, this study examined scale validity and reliability of the widely used Self-Stigma of Seeking Help scale (SSOSH; Vogel, Wade, & Haake, 2006) across samples from 6 different countries (England, Greece, Israel, Taiwan, Turkey, and the United States). Specifically, we used a confirmatory factor analysis framework to conduct measurement invariance analysis and latent mean comparisons of the SSOSH across the 6 sampled countries. Overall, the results suggested that the SSOSH has a similar univariate structure across countries and is sufficiently invariant across countries to be used to explore cultural differences in the way that self-stigma relates to help-seeking behavior.

There is a gap in the literature on the social information processing (SIP) patterns of adolescents exposed to victimization in school. Therefore, we examine the SIP patterns of young adolescents characterized by their teachers and by their own reports as victims, bullies, bullies/victims, and neither bullies nor victims. The 105 adolescents participating in this study were asked to respond to hypothetical social scenarios in which a protagonist is either rebuffed or provoked by peers. The scenarios were ambiguous in nature and thus could have been processed in different ways. Indeed, distinctive processing patterns were found for each of these groups: victims tended to avoid challenging social situations while expecting others to be purposefully hostile or ignoring; bullies tended to interpret others as purposefully hostile and stated their desire to retaliate; bullies/victims showed patterns more similar to those of the bullies than the victims; and those who were neither victims nor bullies tended to view the same challenging social situations as non hostile and more likely to end well for them. We conclude by discussing the theoretical and practical implications of these findings.

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