Oregon University. US: A little bit of sensitivity training can help people form better
first impressions of those with facial paralysis, reducing prejudices
against people with a visible but often unrecognizable disability, new
research from Oregon State University indicates.
There is a natural tendency to base first impressions on a person’s
face, but those impressions can be inaccurate and often negative when
the person has facial paralysis, said Kathleen Bogart, an assistant professor of psychology in the College of Liberal Arts at Oregon State University.
“We wanted to see what we could do to change that, and we found that
education is a powerful tool,” said Bogart, who directs the Disability and Social Interaction Lab at OSU. “It takes away the uncertainty of how to accommodate the disability.”
The research showed that providing education about conditions that
cause facial paralysis helps people correct their misperceptions.
Education efforts could be particularly beneficial to health care
workers, educators or other groups that are more likely to regularly
encounter someone with facial paralysis, Bogart said.
For example, understanding the need to pay attention to other modes
of communication could help a doctor develop a better relationship with a
patient and more accurately detect when the patient is upset or in
pain. It also could help educators avoid the assumption that an
unresponsive face means the student is not attentive, and to understand
when a child is actually engaged in a task, she said.
Bogart is an expert on ableism, or prejudice about disabilities, and
her research focuses on the psychosocial implications of facial movement
disorders such as facial paralysis and Parkinson’s disease, which
affect more than 200,000 Americans. Her interest stems from personal
experience; she has Moebius syndrome, a rare congenital neurological
disorder characterized by facial paralysis and impaired lateral eye
movement.
For the study, she conducted an experiment where some participants
received sensitivity training in the form of educational information
about facial paralysis, including the cause and nature of the
disability. The information stressed the need to focus on body language
and voice cues of people with facial paralysis. Other participants
received no information on facial paralysis.
All 110 study participants were then asked to watch a series of video
clips featuring people with facial paralysis, both mild and severe, and
were asked to rate the sociability of the people in the videos. The
people who read the educational information consistently rated people
with facial paralysis as more sociable than those in the group that did
not read the information.
“We found that awareness and education efforts are effective in
reducing stigma related to rare disabilities such as facial paralysis,”
Bogart said. “That could have a broad impact on the rare disease
community, because many rare diseases are unrecognizable. People who
encounter someone with a rare disease may not understand or know how to
adapt to communicate with them.”
The findings are being published in the February issue of the journal “Patient Education and Counseling.”
Co-author is Linda Tickle-Degnen of Tufts University. The research was
supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health.
Bogart is now developing educational materials about Moebius Syndrome
targeted to educators and health care providers. She and the students
in her lab also are conducting an awareness campaign in conjunction with
Moebius Syndrome Awareness Day, which is held annually on Jan. 24.
The awareness campaign is a pilot project. Bogart and her students
are encouraging people to take a self-portrait with a sign describing
how they express themselves, then sharing the photos on social media
sites using the hashtag #moebiusawareness.
The Moebius Syndrome Foundation and several other college campuses are
also participating in the campaign. For more information on the effort,
visit: http://bit.ly/17BMR8o.
In the future, Bogart hopes to study the effectiveness of such
educational efforts to determine if more information should be included,
if other types of groups might be targeted or if there are other ways
to enhance understanding of rare diseases such as facial paralysis.