The DOI matches its Crossref record; 13 of the 13 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Language of the Lost: An Explication of Stigma Communication
Abstract
Although stigmas appear throughout history, even in present-day virtual communities, an explanation of stigma communication has yet to be offered; this essay attempts to do just that. This essay argues that stigma communication includes specific content: marks, labels, responsibility, and peril, in order to induce affective and cognitive responses to create stigma attitudes, to generate protective action tendencies, and to encourage the sharing of these messages with others. Stigma messages bear the following attributes: they provide cues (a) to distinguish people, (b) to categorize distinguished people as a separate social entity, (c) to imply a responsibility for receiving placement within this distinguished group and their associated peril, and (d) to link this distinguished group to physical and social peril. Different qualities of stigma messages, moreover, evoke different emotions (disgust, fear, and anger) that motivate people to access relevant social attitudes, form or bolster stigma attitudes, and to remove the stigmatized threat. Stigma attitudes encourage the sharing of stigma messages with others in a network, which may, subsequently, bond in-group members.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance
Festinger, L. (1957) · doi:10.1515/9781503620766 · Cited by 24,241
The Social Identity Theory of Intergroup Behavior
Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (2004) · Political Psychology · doi:10.4324/9780203505984-16 · Cited by 13,467
Lazarus, R. S. (1991) · doi:10.1093/oso/9780195069945.001.0001 · Cited by 12,691
Stereotypes and prejudice: Their automatic and controlled components
Devine, P. G. (1989) · Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · doi:10.1037/0022-3514.56.1.5 · Cited by 5,673
Putting the fear back into fear appeals: the extended parallel process model
Witte, K. (1992) · Communication Monographs · doi:10.1080/03637759209376276 · Cited by 3,880
From acts to dispositions the attribution process in person perception
Jones, E. E., & Davis, K. E. (1965) · Advances in Experimental Social Psychology · doi:10.1016/s0065-2601(08)60107-0 · Cited by 3,424
The Social Psychology of Stigma
Major, B., & O'Brien, L. T. (2005) · Annual Review of Psychology · doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.56.091103.070137 · Cited by 3,114
Ekman, P. (1999) · Handbook of Cognition and Emotion · doi:10.1002/0470013494.ch3 · Cited by 2,125
A Modified Labeling Theory Approach to Mental Disorders: An Empirical Assessment
Link, B. G., Cullen, F. T., Struening, E., Shrout, P. E., & Dohrenwend, B. P. (1989) · American Sociological Review · doi:10.2307/2095613 · Cited by 1,935
Social Functions of Emotions at Four Levels of Analysis
Keltner, D., & Haidt, J. (1999) · Cognition and Emotion · doi:10.1080/026999399379168 · Cited by 1,743
Cited by
Beukeboom, C. J., & Burgers, C. (2019) · Review of Communication Research · doi:10.12840/issn.2255-4165.017 · Cited by 126
Mei, K., Fereidooni, S., & Caliskan, A. (2023) · 2023 ACM Conference on Fairness Accountability and Transparency · doi:10.1145/3593013.3594109 · Cited by 56
Undignified Dignity: Using Humor to Manage the Stigma of Mental Illness and Homelessness
Jensen, P. R. (2018) · Communication Quarterly · doi:10.1080/01463373.2017.1325384 · Cited by 27
Pain communication: An agenda for communication researchers
Hintz, E. A. (2020) · Annals of the International Communication Association · doi:10.1080/23808985.2020.1843368 · Cited by 18
Communication and Disenfranchised Grief: Managing the Unrecognized Grief of Pet Loss
Marr, C. T., Kaufman, S. V. A., & Craig, E. A. (2022) · Advances in Linguistics and Communication Studies · doi:10.4018/978-1-7998-9125-3.ch023 · Cited by 8
Metadata
- Authors
- Smith, R. A.
- Venue
- Communication Theory
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press (OUP)
- Published
- 2007-11
- Volume
- 17
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 462-485
- ISSN
- 1050-3293 (ISSN-L)
- 1468-2885
- OpenAlex
- W2164803364
- Cited by
- 440
- References
- 13
- FWCI
- 7.90
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Language of the Lost: An Explication of Stigma Communication. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1111/j.1468-2885.2007.00307.x
- The paper
- Smith, R. A. (2007). Language of the Lost: An Explication of Stigma Communication. Communication Theory. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2885.2007.00307.x
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.