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Decomposing implicit associations about life and death improves our understanding of suicidal behavior
Author(s) -
O’Shea Brian A.,
Glenn Jeffrey J.,
Millner Alexander J.,
Teachman Bethany A.,
Nock Matthew K.
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
suicide and life‐threatening behavior
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.544
H-Index - 90
eISSN - 1943-278X
pISSN - 0363-0234
DOI - 10.1111/sltb.12652
Subject(s) - implicit association test , association (psychology) , psychology , clinical psychology , cognition , psychiatry , developmental psychology , psychotherapist
The Death/Suicide Implicit Association Test (IAT) is effective at detecting and prospectively predicting suicidal thoughts and behaviors. However, traditional IAT scoring procedures used in all prior studies (i.e., D ‐scores) provide an aggregate score that is inherently relative, obfuscating the separate associations (i.e., “Me = Death/Suicide,” “Me = Life”) that might be most relevant for understanding suicide‐related implicit cognition. Here, we decompose the D‐ scores and validate a new analytic technique called the Decomposed D ‐scores (“ DD ‐scores”) that creates separate scores for each category (“Me,” “Not Me”) in the IAT. Across large online volunteer samples ( N > 12,000), results consistently showed that a weakened association between “Me = Life” is more strongly predictive of having a history of suicidal attempts than is a stronger association between “Me = Death/Suicide.” These findings replicated across three different versions of the IAT and were observed when calculated using both reaction times and error rates. However, among those who previously attempted suicide, a strengthened association between “Me = Death” is more strongly predictive of the recency of a suicide attempt. These results suggest that decomposing traditional IAT D ‐scores can offer new insights into the mental associations that may underlie clinical phenomena and may help to improve the prediction, and ultimately the prevention, of these clinical outcomes.