Patients with schizophrenia and their families have suffered greatly from the stigmatizing effects and the educational, vocational, and interpersonal barriers resulting from negative social attitudes toward their conditions. Patients with schizophrenia have tremendous difficulties finding employment and acquiring living quarters, and they suffer from falsely pressed charges for violent crimes by these kinds of stigmatizing effects [
1‐
7]. From this situation has arisen increasing interest in how these negative attitudes towards schizophrenia may interfere with their various abilities and also with their efforts to obtain effective treatment [
8,
9]. To reduce mental illness-related stigma (particularly regarding schizophrenia), various programs are underway internationally [
1,
10,
11]. Although the view of schizophrenia has been changing according to advances in neurobiological understanding of the disorder, pharmacology and psychosocial treatments [
12], prejudice and stigma are still prevalent even among medical professionals, and providing explanations of the biomolecular profile of mental illnesses is not sufficient to solve these problems [
13,
14]. As part of the attempt to improve this situation, the Japanese Society of Psychiatry and Neurology replaced the old Japanese term for schizophrenia, “Seishin-Bunretsu-Byo” (Mind-Split Disease), with a new term, “Togo-Shitcho-Sho” (Integration Disorder), officially announced at the 12th World Congress of Psychiatry, Yokohama, Japan, 2002. The former term has been said to lead the public to misunderstand and stigmatize individuals with schizophrenia. In western society, the term also implies “split” and is frequently misunderstood as “split personality” [
15] or is inappropriately metaphorized [
16]. The change of the term in Japan has been disseminated throughout Japanese society and has also attracted worldwide interest [
12,
17,
18]. As mentioned above, the most prevalently held stereotype of people with mental illness is that they are unpredictable and dangerous [
6,
19]. However, previous studies have revealed that severe mental illness per se does not predict an increased risk of violent behavior and that people with mental illness are far more likely to be victims of crime than perpetrators [
20,
21]. We assessed the impact of this renaming on implicit stigma associated with schizophrenia using the Implicit Association Test (IAT), reporting that the renaming led to reduced stigma, in that fewer people, at least among non-medical undergraduate students [
22], tended to associate the new term with criminality. Information concerning prejudice and stigma, usually gathered using questionnaires, is subject to response bias due to social desirability [
2,
23‐
25]. IAT is a method developed in the field of social psychology to assess implicit (unaware, hidden) attitudes by measuring the strength of the associations between mental representations from different categories of objects in memory [
26]. The logic of IAT is that the sorting task should be easier, and thus faster, when the two concepts that share a response are implicitly associated. IAT has been successfully employed to assess attitudes associated with homosexuality [
27,
28], smoking [
29], and consumer products [
30].Most of the research concerning prejudice and stigma related to schizophrenia is intended to benefit the public, patients and their families. The attitudes of mental health professionals toward schizophrenia are also very important, as they can directly influence treatment outcomes and the quality of life experienced by patients with schizophrenia, as well as have an effect on the general population. Some studies indicated that persons with seemingly more knowledge about mental illness were less likely to endorse stigma and discrimination [
22] and that education and exposure lead to a decline in stigmatized attitudes [
31,
32], whereas other studies indicated that medical professionals’ attitudes were similar to those found among the general public [
13,
33] or that there was no consensus [
34,
35]. Exposure to mental illness had a significant influence on the attitudes towards mental illness [
36,
37]. However, how contact with schizophrenia patients affects the formation of negative attitudes towards schizophrenia at implicit and explicit levels has been poorly understood. Thus, how patients with schizophrenia are viewed by clinical residents after the experience of conducting therapy for schizophrenia should be of considerable interest to medical professionals.Based on these findings, we assessed the impact of the renaming of schizophrenia on the attitudes held by clinical residents, which had already been proven for non-medical undergraduate students as subjects by Takahashi et al. (2009) [
22]. Also, as the most interesting theme in this study, we assessed the impact of the contact with schizophrenia patients on these clinical residents to shed some light on the complicated issue of prejudice and stigma, since we considered that prejudice and stigma toward schizophrenia could be based on knowledge and experience of schizophrenia at both implicit and explicit levels, and especially by direct contact with such patients. As subjects we selected clinical residents, for they had just graduated from medical school and so far had presumably had little contact with schizophrenia patients. Then we assessed the change of attitudes toward schizophrenia between before and after clinical training in psychiatry. In the assessment we used IAT according to the previous study [
22], as it was designed for both the old diagnostic Japanese term for schizophrenia, “Seishin-Bunretsu-Byo”, and the new diagnostic term “Togo-Shitcho-Sho”. Before beginning their training in psychiatry, clinical residents have of course already completed their classroom course work in schizophrenia, but they have had little experience in terms of direct contact with schizophrenia patients. Then, in their clinical psychiatry training, they experience the application of therapy, and have direct contact with these patients for the first time. Then, by comparing their attitudes toward schizophrenia between before and after their clinical psychiatry training, the significance of having contact with schizophrenia patients became clear, shedding some light on how contact with schizophrenia patients affects the formation of negative attitudes towards schizophrenia at implicit and explicit levels.