Measuring the suicidal mind: implicit cognition predicts suicidal behavior

By Matthew K. Nock, Jennifer M. Park, Christine T. Finn, Tara Deliberto, Halina J. Dour, Mahzarin R. Banaji. Psychology Science, 2010

621 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Suicide is difficult to predict and prevent because people who consider killing themselves often are unwilling or unable to report their intentions. Advances in the measurement of implicit cognition provide an opportunity to test whether automatic associations of self with death can provide a behavioral marker for suicide risk. We measured implicit associations about death/suicide in 157 people seeking treatment at a psychiatric emergency department. Results confirmed that people who have attempted suicide hold a significantly stronger implicit association between death/suicide and self than do psychiatrically distressed individuals who have not attempted suicide. Moreover, the implicit association of death/suicide with self was associated with an approximately 6-fold increase in the odds of making a suicide attempt in the next 6 months, exceeding the predictive validity of known risk factors (e.g., depression, suicide-attempt history) and both patients’ and clinicians’ predictions. These results provide the first evidence of a behavioral marker for suicidal behavior and suggest that measures of implicit cognition may be useful for detecting and predicting sensitive clinical behaviors that are unlikely to be reported.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Psychiatry and Mental health, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1b4e451e67f09ca46d9ab81c795aebcdcf76751c

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Citations in the corpus

Design of the Army Study to Assess Risk and Resilience in Servicemembers (Army STARRS) (2013, background): “, 2005) and non-fatal suicidal behaviors (Nock et al., 2010; Bridge et al., 2012), and the designs of Army STARRS”
Self-injurious thoughts and behaviors as risk factors for future suicide ideation, attempts, and death: a meta-analysis of longitudinal studies (2015, neutral): “Yet large discrepancies exist in this literature as well, with some studies reporting moderate-to-strong effects (Nock et al. 2010; Roaldset et al. 2012; Troister et al. 2013) and others small or nonsignificant effects (Sher et al.”
Holding on to our functional roots when exploring new intellectual islands: A voyage through implicit cognition research (2012, neutral): “…to provide a functional definition of automaticity (De Houwer, & Moors, in press). likelihood of attempting suicide in the following 6 months (Nock et al., 2010), while automatic evaluative responding to one’s partner predicts risk of future relationship breakup (Lee, Rogge, & Reis, 2010).”
What Role Does Grit Play in the Academic Success of Black Male Collegians at Predominantly White Institutions? (2014, positive): “The weight of empirical evidence, to date, suggests that what students do matters most (Astin 2003; Pascarella and Terenzini 2005) and the bulk of recent research in developmental psychology supports this conclusion (e.g., Nock et al. 2010; Vaughn et al. 2008).”
Risk Factors for Suicidal Thoughts and Behaviors: A Meta-Analysis of 50 Years of Research (2017, positive): “Several such factors have recently been proposed, but they have rarely (e.g., implicit identification with death/suicide; Nock et al., 2010) or never been directly tested as risk factors (e.”
The Army Study to Assess Risk and Resilience in Servicemembers (Army STARRS) (2014, positive): “While a number of retrospective case-control studies have previously studied risk-resilience for suicidal behaviors (Bridge et al., 2012; Cavanagh, Carson, Sharpe, & Lawrie, 2003; Dumais et al., 2005; Nock et al., 2010), the integration of SHOS-A/B with the AAS creates a unique opportunity to addres”
The Interpersonal Theory of Suicide: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of a Decade of Cross-National Research (2017, positive): “, through reaction time (RT)-based tasks) may be an effective strategy to circumvent these concerns (Nock & Banaji, 2007; Nock et al., 2010); though, more research is needed on this front, particularly with regard to their utility in military samples (Chiurliza et al.”
Mass Shooters in the USA, 1966–2010: Differences Between Attackers Who Live and Die (2015, background): “However, testing for differences between suicidal and nonsuicidal mass shooters would be very hard to do accurately, because suicidal intent is so difficult to measure (Maris, Berman, & Silverman, 2000; Nock et al., 2010).”
Thwarted Belongingness and Perceived Burdensomeness: Construct Validity and Psychometric Properties of the Interpersonal Needs Questionnaire (2011, positive): “Additional support for the construct validity of scores derived from the INQ could be gained by utilizing nonself-report cognitive tasks, such as the implicit associations task (Nock et al., 2010).”
Science Current Directions in Psychological Current Directions in Violence Risk Assessment on Behalf Of: Association for Psychological Science (neutral): “We might speculate that incremental advances could be made by exploring novel assessment methods, including implicit measures (Nock et al., 2010) or simple heuristics (Goldstein & Gigerenzer, 2009).”