Rape victims differ in their style of communicating their experience to others in their environment. An emotional style of self-presentation can be distinguished from a numbed style of presentation. The present experiment tests the hypothesis that a numbed style of self-presentation, as compared to an emotional one, will result more strongly in secondary victimization by the environment. Experimental results suggest among others that a victim characterized by an emotional self-presentation is more strongly perceived as a woman who exhibited caution, and as a person who was not responsible for the situation. Some implications of this perceptual bias in observers are discussed.
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