Self‐injurious implicit attitudes among adolescent suicide attempters versus those engaged in nonsuicidal self‐injury

Abstract

Strong implicit attitudes towards suicide/death among adolescents with NSSI without a prior SA suggest that clinicians should not dismiss NSSI as not serious. Further work is required to elucidate the mechanism by which youths engaged in NSSI acquire these stronger identifications and make a first-time SA to develop novel treatment and prevention strategies blocking this transformation, ultimately reducing youth suicide.

Life is Good, But Death Ain’t Bad Either: Counter-Intuitive Implicit Biases to Death in a Normative Population

“…This result therefore provides evidence for the assumptions made with previous research, whether explicitly or implicitly (e.g., Nock et al, 2010;Dickstein et al, 2015) that normative participants do indeed demonstrate "self-life" effects specifically, as opposed to "self-not-death" biases.…”

“…This study therefore tests the assumption made with previous research, whether explicitly or implicitly, that normative participants do indeed demonstrate specific "self-life" and/or "selfnot-death" biases (i.e., Dickstein et al, 2015;Harrison, Stritzke, Fay, Ellison, & Hudaib, 2014;Nock et al, 2010;Price, Nock, Charney, & Mathew, 2009;Price et al, 2014;Randall et al, 2013;Tang, Wu, & Miao, 2013;Violanti, Mnatsakanova, & Andrew, 2013). Participants completed both a death-identity IAT and a death-identity IRAP that was created from the same stimuli.…”

“…In the current study, participants were exposed to the death-identity IAT, which has previously been used to study attitudes to death and their relation to suicidality (e.g., Nock et al, 2010;Dickstein et al, 2015). In addition, participants were asked to complete two versions of the IRAP, one that targeted death-identity and one that targeted death-evaluations.…”

“…The Implicit Association Test (Greenwald et al, 1998) is a computer-based test that assesses reaction time biases. The current study employed the deathidentity stimulus set developed by Nock and colleagues (2010) that has been employed in multiple previous studies (e.g., Dickstein et al, 2015;Harrison et al, 2014;Price et al, 2014Price et al, , 2009Randall et al, 2013;Tang et al, 2013;Violanti et al, 2013). One small modification was made to the stimulus set: due to ethical constraints on asking university students about suicide, and in order to assess attitudes to death generally rather than suicide specifically, the stimulus "suicide" was substituted for the word "death".…”

“…While previous research on implicit attitudes to death has explored the associations between the concepts of (a) self and evaluation (i.e., "self-esteem": Creemers, Scholte, Engels, Prinstein, & Wiers, 2013;Dickstein et al, 2015;Franck, De Raedt, Dereu, & Van den Abbeele, 2007;Glashouwer et al, 2010;Price et al, 2009;Price et al, 2014); and (b) self and death (i.e., "death-identity": Dickstein et al, 2015;Harrison et al, 2014;Nock et al, 2010;Price et al, 2009;Price et al, 2014;Randall et al, 2013;Tang et al, 2013;Violanti et al, 2013); no work has explored the association between death and evaluation. This is somewhat surprising, given the centrality of evaluations within many psychological theories that focus on death.…”