Negative affect influences suicide-specific attentional biases

Background: Studies using tasks that measure suicide-specific attentional biases have not specified which attentional processes are related to risk for suicidal thoughts and behaviors. This study distinguished suicide-specific engagement and disengagement biases from other forms of cognitive processing and investigated under which affective conditions suicide-specific biases emerged. Method: An ethnoracially and socioeconomically diverse sample of 153 young adults (87 % female; 52 % Non-Hispanic White), ages 18–34, with moderate-to-high symptoms of anxiety, depression, or recent suicide ideation were randomly assigned to experience positive, negative, or neutral affect, completed cognitive tasks of attention, construct accessibility, and threat bias, and self-report measures. Results: Individuals with recent ideation displayed facilitated disengagement from suicide-specific stimuli irrespective of affective state. Those with distal ideation showed slower disengagement from suicide-specific stimuli in the sad condition only. Conclusions: Individuals with recent suicide ideation display automatic processing of suicide-related information, perhaps due to recent rehearsal of suicide-related content. In contrast, individuals with distal ideation experiencing negative affect appear to have difficulty disengaging attention from suicide-related content. Limits to generalizability of the findings include a predominantly female sample, although the sample’s racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic diversity increase generality of the research.