Stopping Stigma: Behavioural Conditioning and Changes in Attitudes Toward Disease Employing Leprosy and HIV/AIDS as Case Studies

Abstract

Why do we behave the way we do? Can behaviour be modified? This thesis explores these questions by looking at behavioural and neuropsychology and how we control two basic emotions: fear and disgust. As this thesis will demonstrate, these two emotions compel us to avoid danger and go to extreme lengths to keep "safe." Using leprosy as its first case study, it tracks the evolution of more positive attitudes towards people with leprosy. It explores what life was like in Western Europe's 11th to 13th centuries. It juxtaposes those positive attitudes against later negative attitudes. It examines the stigmatization of diseases and disabilities, asking what fear and disgust are and how they affect human behaviour. This sets the stage for discussing HIV/AIDS, compared to leprosy, to demonstrate similar behaviour. The focal point of attitudes towards leprosy and HIV/AIDS is behavioural conditioning, a technique for retraining the brain to reinterpret a stimulus to mean something else. This thesis argues that this method can reduce fear, disgust, and stigma in most attitudes and behaviours about diseases and disabilities.