Blaming the Self or the System: How Stigma Shapes the Psychological Impact of Scarcity

Common mental disorders, including anxiety disorders, are highly prevalent. However, in contrast to popular belief, anxiety disorders are not a disease of affluence. In all countries around the world, anxiety disorders are more prevalent in people who live in poverty. Nonetheless, psychological research on anxiety disorders and sociological research on poverty have largely been conducted separately, thereby neglecting the potential interaction between the two. As a consequence, the mechanism(s) underlying this relationship between poverty and anxiety disorders are unclear. People living in poverty are constantly faced with a sense of scarcity: they have too few resources to obtain a proper living standard. As a consequence, people in poverty struggle to survive within their environment, and the increased risk for anxiety disorders and accompanying (work) disability further intensifies this struggle. In order to uncover how to break this vicious cycle, we need to uncover which mechanism(s) play a role in the heightened risk of anxiety disorders in those experiencing scarcity. Recent work highlights that the social meaning attached to poverty may play a strong role in its psychological consequences. Individuals who internalize stigma (perceiving poverty as a personal failure rather than a structural problem), report higher levels of shame, stress and reduced self-efficacy. On the other hand attributing poverty to systemic or societal factors may buffer these effects by reducing self-blame and perceived controllability. Understanding how such different forms of stigma shape the experience of scarcity is essential, as stigma not only influences emotional responses but can also affect learning, motivation, and avoidance behaviors that maintain anxiety over time. In the current study, we will focus on the influence of experimentally induced scarcity on learning mechanisms that play a crucial role in the onset and perpetuation of anxiety disorders; more specifically extinction. Besides that we will also focus on the role of stigma around poverty and what kind of influence different types of stigma (empasis on yourself or emphasis on society) might have on the experience of scarcity.