INSPIRES Hearing Health Trial - INnovative Psychological Intervention to REduce Stigma in Hearing Health Trial

According to self-affirmation theory (Steele, 1988), defensiveness arises because people are motivated to defend their global sense of self-worth, which in the present case is threatened by perceptions of hearing aids/loss. However, if a person's self-image can be bolstered (affirmed) in a domain that is important to them, thereby preserving self-integrity, the individual should be less likely to process the threatening (i.e., stigmatizing in the present context) information defensively (Steele, 1988).