A Specific Attentional Bias in Suicide Attempters

Abstract

Selective attention in patients after an attempted suicide was investigated to find out whether a specific attentional bias for suicide-related materials exists and to clarify the possible role of emotions in the bias. Thirty-one patients who had previously attempted to commit suicide and 31 control participants took part in a modified Stroop task. The suicidal patients took significantly longer to name the colors of suicide-related words compared with other words, whereas color naming times of the control participants did not differ for suicide-related, neutral, positive, or negative words. Therefore, the attentional bias exhibited by suicidal patients was highly specific. There was no relation between the bias and measures of anxiety, depression, or hopelessness, whereas suicidal ideation correlated significantly with the attentional bias.

Cortical and Subcortical Abnormalities in Late-Onset Depression With History of Suicide Attempts Investigated With MRI and Voxel-Based Morphometry

“…The noticed GM reduction at fronto-parietal-cerebellar network in the DS group coincided with the lowered executive functioning, cognitive inflexibility, impaired decision making or problem solving observed in suicide attempters, [68][69][70]72,75,77,82 which was further supported by previous functional imaging studies. 80,83 Attempt to suicide is highly related to the intensity of hopelessness (review).…”

Psychological Models of Suicide

“…Many of the constructs included in the model have an empirical basis (for extensive review see Wenzel, Brown, & Beck, 2009). Studies that assessed suicide-specific attention bias among suicide attempters have used cross-sectional designs (Becker, Strohbach, & Rinck, 1999;Keilp, Gorlyn, Oquendo et al, 2008;Malloy-Diniz, Neves, Abrantes et al, 2009;Williams & Broadbent, 1986). There was only one recent prospective design that showed that attention bias precedes suicide attempt (Cha, Najmi, Park et al, 2011).…”

Specificity and generalization of attentional bias in sexual trauma victims suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder

“…In a typical EST, participants have to view words of varying emotional significance (e.g., unpleasant, neutral, and pleasant words), which are printed in varying colors. Participants have to name the print color of each word while trying to ignore the words' meaning (Becker, Strohbach, & Rinck, 1999;McNally, 1998). The rationale behind the task is that those who experienced a trauma will show delayed color-naming for trauma-related words, in contrast to neutral-affect and positiveaffect words, because trauma-related words quickly catch their attention and interfere with the relatively slow color-naming process (Williams, Mathews, & MacLeod, 1996).…”