Clinical judgements of self-dramatisation. A test of the sexist hypothesis.

It has been claimed that the diagnosis of histrionic personality disorder is inherently sexist. To estimate the extent to which psychiatrists are influenced by sexist prejudice in their judgements about self-dramatization (the central trait in the histrionic cluster), we conducted a study in which male and female subjects rated the degree of self-dramatization portrayed in videotaped vignettes. The results did not support the sexist hypothesis that dramatic behaviour would more often be attributed to a woman than to a man, especially by male raters.