Giving Meaning to Alzheimer's Disease: An Experimental Study Using a Framing Approach

The prejudices and stereotypes associated with Alzheimer's disease (AD) are based on contents that highlight the most negative and dramatic aspects of the symptoms of this disease. This is reinforced by the preponderance of negative representations related to AD. In this paper, these representations have been analyzed as frames. The most dominant frame used to represent dementia is "body-mind dualism," and its alternative is the "body-mind unity" counter-frame. This study aims to define the impact of different messages inspired by the Dualism frame and the Unity counter-frame in the collective representation and meaning given to AD. Posters of simulated health campaigns about AD were designed, combining contents related to the Dualism frame and the Unity counter-frame, and were shown to 85 participants. To analyze the impact of both types of frameworks, a pre-post record of the attitudes of the participants toward AD was conducted using the Attitudes toward Dementia Scale. The assessment of the campaign and the self-report emotions were also registered. Participants' eye movements were measured during exposure to the posters. Attitudes toward dementia were found to be significantly more positive following exposure to discourses characteristic of the Unity counter-frame. Likewise, the dualism discourse evoked more sadness and anger. Moreover, the posters that used the discourse of the Unity counter-frame were considered more useful. We concluded that attitudes toward dementia are influenced by framing. Designing suitable health campaigns using these frames could help mitigate the attitudes and stigma associated with AD.