Further analyses on the socio-demographic correlates of the four AMI factors suggested that the relationships between several socio-demographic characteristics and attitudes were quite consistent across different factors. Firstly, people belonging to the older age group (50–65 years) generally had more negative attitudes towards the mentally ill, and this applied for ‘social distancing’, ‘social restrictiveness’ and ‘prejudice and misconception’. A literature review on public attitudes towards mental illness suggested that out of the 33 studies, 32 reported positive associations between negative attitudes and age . Similar findings were also reported in local studies, with younger adults being more tolerant  and less stigmatising . This might be due to improved public knowledge of mental illness , and the development of information technology which makes such knowledge easily accessible especially for young adults who are more familiar with the use of such technology. Gender was another factor affecting public attitudes. The relationship between gender and public attitudes could vary due to different reasons such as cultural differences [19, 20]. A previous local study on stigma suggested that female gender was likely to be associated with lower stigma among the general population in Singapore . A 2006 review also summarized that females reported more positive attitudes to mental illness among more than half of the studies which had explored this issue . This is similar to our findings, where females showed more tolerance and support for community care, less social restrictiveness, and less prejudice and misconception towards people with mental illness. Although some studies also indicated that females tended to desire less social distance than males [13, 29, 30]; this relationship was not evident among our sample. Potential reasons could be that items used to measure social distance in our instrument were about the distance in the neighbourhood or community; however, for other studies, they focused on social distance in terms of personal contact with individuals with mental illness [13, 30]. Lower education was also found to be consistently associated with more negative attitudes to mental illness across all four factors of AMI. This finding has been reported by other studies as well [13, 28, 31], and it suggests that individuals with higher education had greater knowledge relating to mental illness. Another explanation could be that people with higher education have more access to health information, or they have a better understanding of such information as a result of their higher education.