Implicit attitudes and psychopathology

The past 15 years have witnessed an ever-growing interest in the role of implicit attitudes in mental and health-related problems and disorders. The purpose of the present paper is to provide an introduction to this research area. More specifically the following issues will be addressed: 1) Why do researchers consider implicit attitudes to be of interest? 2) In what way have researchers in the field of experimental psychopathology studied implicit attitudes? and 3) What has this research yielded so far? Rather than providing an exhaustive review, this last question is addressed by discussing some illustrative studies for several types of psychopathology. It is concluded that this is a promising field of research, but that a number of important questions remain unanswered. The paper is ended with a short discussion of possible directions for future research.