Another controlled strategy for examining the impact of signaling events is the use of pictures or videotapes to examine how physical appearance affects stigmatizing reactions. Although the use of narratives and pictures facilitates the internal validity of research in this area, it is difficult to determine how well these manipulations reflect real-world reactions to persons with mental illness. Weiner identified several limitations to research on attribution theory that illustrates this problem. For example, he observed that narratives are perceived as artificial by research participants because they differ with their life experience. These methods also have limited generalizability. Namely, the signaling variable of interest—mental illness label, psychiatric symptom, or physical feature—issalientin the narrative or picture.However, much of the presentation of mental illness is subtle. Hence, the public does not typically experience mental illness as a signaling event in the obvious manner of studies with narratives and pictures. Research needs to examine the relative salience of labels, symptoms, and physical appearance on stigmatizing reactions