Rebecca Pearl
University of Florida, FL·Psychology·Early-career
People with health conditions are often judged, blamed, or avoided because of their illness. This is health-related stigma, and it can harm both mental and physical health.
- Fields
Psychology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Public Health & Epidemiology
- Topics
health-related stigma
internalized stigma
self-stigma
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Adapt a group counseling intervention originally designed for one form of health-related stigma so that it generalizes to patients with a range of visible and concealable health conditions.
- Adapt a self-report measure of internalized stigma, first developed for a single condition, so it can assess self-stigma across patients with differing health conditions, and pilot it before the trial.
- Test in an online randomized controlled trial with 195 adults whether transdiagnostic group counseling reduces internalized stigma more than a general peer support group or a waitlist control.
- Compare the three study conditions on mental health and health-related quality of life across the 26-week schedule of weekly, biweekly, and monthly group sessions.
More about the research
When people come to believe these negative messages about themselves (internalized stigma, or self-stigma), the harm is often greater than from outside discrimination alone. Patients who internalize stigma report avoiding health care settings, disengaging from managing their disease, and showing physiological signs of stress. The conditions involved range from visible ones, such as obesity, skin disease, or disfiguring cancers, to concealable ones, such as HIV, diabetes, or chronic pain. Past research has mostly studied one condition's stigma at a time; this project instead takes a transdiagnostic approach, meaning one program designed to work across many different health conditions.
Why it matters
Internalized stigma can push patients away from clinics and away from managing their own disease, compounding the burden of illness. A counseling approach that works across conditions could give people living with obesity, HIV, diabetes, chronic pain, skin disease, and other stigmatized conditions an accessible online way to cope with stigma, and may improve their mental health and quality of life.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
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Boston University, MA·Public Health & Epidemiology
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University of Washington, WA·Medicine & Clinical Research
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Emily Zale
Binghamton University, NY·Psychology
Develop and refine telehealth protocols for a pain-targeted motivational smoking intervention and a time-matched active control, using iterative feedback from three groups of smokers with chronic pain not ready to quit.
The school
University of Florida: 65 labs on PI Pages, $1.3B a year on research, 795 research doctorates a year.
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