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European majority group members increasingly perceive threats to national continuity, which in turn leads to defensive reactions, including prejudice against Muslim immigrants. However, according to self-affirmation theory, individuals can respond in a less defensive manner if they have affirmed positive aspects of their self-concept (self-affirmation) or their social identity (group-affirmation). In the present research, we test the potential of affirmation procedures as tools for reducing prejudice towards Muslim immigrants when national continuity is threatened. We examine the impact of personal vs. normative attachment to Christian roots of national identity on the efficacy of affirmation procedures, and the congruence between the threatened and the affirmed domains of the self. Results show that group-affirmation reduced opposition to Muslims' rights amongst participants personally attached to the idea that national continuity is based on Christian roots. The discussion stresses the importance of non-congruence between the threatened domain of the self and the affirmed domain for the design of affirmation procedures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Territorial stigmatisation in France is produced and enacted through a wide range of agencies: the media, political and policy discourses, academic debates on the alleged 'ghettoisation' of French outer city, and the official 'urban policy' of the central government. This paper departs from research seeking to analyse the production and diffusion of these disparaging images by focusing on the perspective and reactions of the bearers of the stigma. Drawing on 18 months of field observation in two defamed housing estates in Nîmes, in Southern France, I question the thesis of the wholesale internalisation of negative representations by residents of the banlieues. I propose instead that their perceptions of stigma are deeply ambivalent, as evidenced by their abiding attachment to place. Mindful of the danger of romanticising the subaltern, I argue that many transgressions of the norms of dominant society are ways of deflecting and displacing the language of spatial stigma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]