In this study, the paths between two prejudicial attitudes (authoritarianism and benevolence) and a proxy measure of behavioral discrimination (social distance) were examined in a sample drawn from the general public. Moreover, the effects of two person variables (familiarity with mental illness and ethnicity) on prejudice were examined in the path analysis. One hundred fifty-one research participants completed measures of prejudice toward, social distance from, and familiarity with mental illness. Goodness-of-fit indexes from path analyses supported our hypotheses. Social distance is influenced by both kinds of prejudice: authoritarianism (the belief that persons with mental illness cannot care for themselves, so a paternalistic health system must do so) and benevolence (the belief that persons with mental illness are innocent and childlike). These forms of prejudice, in turn, are influenced by the believers' familiarity with mental illness and their ethnicity. We also discuss how these findings might contribute to a fuller understanding of mental illness stigma.

Two stigmatizing attitudes related to dangerousness and personal responsibility may undermine the opportunities of persons with serious mental illness. This study set out to examine path models that explain how these attitudes lead to discriminatory behavior and to assess the impact of antistigma programs on components of personal responsibility and dangerousness models. Two hundred thirteen persons were randomly assigned to one of five antistigma conditions: education on personal responsibility, education on dangerousness, contact with a person with serious mental illness where personal responsibility is discussed, contact where dangerousness is discussed, or no change. Persons completed an attribution questionnaire (AQ) representing personal responsibility and dangerousness path models at pretest, posttest, and 1-week followup. They also completed tasks that represented helping behavior. Goodness of fit indexes from linear structural modeling were mixed for both models but suggested that fear of dangerousness was a key attitude leading to discriminatory behavior. Results also showed that subjects who had contact with persons with serious mental illness experienced greater changes than subjects in the education or control groups did on measures of attribution and helping behavior.

Approaches to social change that increase the public's familiarity with serious mental illness will decrease stigma. Further studies are warranted that focus on how contact between members of the general public and persons who have serious mental illness may be facilitated.

Recent years have seen the greatest ecological disturbances of our times, with global human expansion, species and habitat loss, climate change, and the emergence of new and previously-known infectious diseases. Biodiversity loss affects infectious disease risk by disrupting normal relationships between hosts and pathogens. Mosquito-borne pathogens respond to changing dynamics on multiple transmission levels and appear to increase in disturbed systems, yet current knowledge of mosquito diversity and the relative abundance of vectors as a function of habitat change is limited. We characterize mosquito communities across habitats with differing levels of anthropogenic ecological disturbance in central Thailand. During the 2008 rainy season, adult mosquito collections from 24 sites, representing 6 habitat types ranging from forest to urban, yielded 62,126 intact female mosquitoes (83,325 total mosquitoes) that were assigned to 109 taxa. Female mosquito abundance was highest in rice fields and lowest in forests. Diversity indices and rarefied species richness estimates indicate the mosquito fauna was more diverse in rural and less diverse in rice field habitats, while extrapolated estimates of true richness (Chao1 and ACE) indicated higher diversity in the forest and fragmented forest habitats and lower diversity in the urban. Culex sp. (Vishnui subgroup) was the most common taxon found overall and the most frequent in fragmented forest, rice field, rural, and suburban habitats. The distributions of species of medical importance differed significantly across habitat types and were always lowest in the intact, forest habitat. The relative abundance of key vector species, Aedes aegypti and Culex quinquefasciatus, was negatively correlated with diversity, suggesting that direct species interactions and/or habitat-mediated factors differentially affecting invasive disease vectors may be important mechanisms linking biodiversity loss to human health. Our results are an important first step for understanding the dynamics of mosquito vector distributions under changing environmental features across landscapes of Thailand.

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