The second literature the psychological mediation framework draws upon is the social psychology of stigma. Beginning with the seminal work of Goffman (1963), social psychological research has been interested in understanding the negative effects of stigma. Much of the research that has emerged from this tradition has focused on adverse outcomes such as academic performance and self-esteem (for a review, see Major & O’Brien, 2005; see also Crocker et al., 1998) rather than the development of mental disorders per se. In addition, although this research has examined individual responses to discrimination and stigma (e.g., re-appraisal), the focus is often on group-level processes (e.g., disidentification) that protect against low self-esteem. The psychological mediation framework advanced in this paper extends this prior research in two important respects: (a) it focuses on processes previously shown to contribute to psychopathology, and (b) the outcomes of interest are specific classes of psychopathology.
