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Article History

Received: 15 November 2025

Accepted: 14 July 2026

First Online: 23 July 2026

Declarations

Ethics approval and consent to participate: This study was conducted in accordance with the ethical principles outlined in the Declaration of Helsinki. All procedures involving human participants adhered to the ethical standards of the institutional and national research committee and followed the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later revisions. The study protocol was reviewed and approved by the Ethics Research Committee of Iran University of Medical Sciences (Approval Number: IR.IUMS.FMD.REC.1401.331, Protocol Number: 23842). Written informed consent was obtained from all participants prior to study inclusion. The committee reviewed the study protocol, including study objectives, participant recruitment procedures, informed consent process, and data protection measures. The Ethics Committee monitored compliance with approved procedures throughout the study period. To ensure privacy and data confidentiality, each participant received a random unique code used to link their responses across the explicit stigma questionnaire and the IAT platform. Demographic information and test data were stored separately without any personal identifiers. These codes were entered individually by participants and were not accessible to the examiners or data analysts. All electronic data were stored on a password protected system with restricted access limited to authorized members of the research team. These procedures guaranteed full anonymization of participant data while allowing synchronized analysis of explicit and implicit stigma measures.

Consent for publication: Not applicable. This manuscript does not contain any individual person’s data in any form (individual details, images, or videos). Therefore, consent for publication is not applicable.

Competing interests: The authors declare no competing interests.