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

Abstract

The current study explored implicit attitudes to life and death in a student population using both the Implicit Association Test (IAT) and the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP).The IAT was similar to one used in previously published researched in the context of the prospective prediction of suicide and self-harm. Two IRAPs were employed, one that assessed relational responses specific to death and life with respect to self, and a second that assessed relational responses specific to evaluations of death and life. The IAT replicated previous results found in normative populations. The IRAPs indicated "prolife" biases, as expected. However, they also failed to demonstrate the presence of strong "antideath" biases, and in one case a specific "death-positive" bias was found. The results observed on the explicit measures did not readily explain the absent or "prodeath" effects observed on the IRAPs. Indeed, participants reported a normative level of anxiety and fear of death. Implications for the study of implicit attitudes to death using the IRAP are considered.

Individuals with current suicidal ideation demonstrate implicit “fearlessness of death”

“…However, research elsewhere has noted a positivity bias on the IRAP, and suggested that this may be due in part to interaction between the valence of the target stimuli (i.e., positive vs negative) and the valence of the response options (i.e., true vs. false, which are slightly positively and negatively valenced, respectively: see Hussey, Daly, & Barnes-Holmes, 2015). Similar valence asymmetries have also been found on other implicit measures, such as the Brief IAT (Nosek, Bar-Anan, Sriram, Axt, & Greenwald, 2014).…”

Using a Modified Function Acquisition Speed Test (FAST) for Assessing Implicit Gender Stereotypes

“…The lack of direct correlation between the two measures, however, is worthy of consideration. While spurious or absent correlations between two implicit measures is not uncommon (Bosson, Swann, & Pennebaker, 2000;Hussey, Daly, & Barnes-Holmes, 2015), the paradigmatic differences across the two measures may point to the effects of even slight alterations to procedural or quantification methods. More specifically, it could be possible that the IAT and FAST index different features of response strength, or are differentially sensitive to different products of a relational history (i.e., relative speed of responding versus relative rate of learning across fixed discrimination blocks).…”

“…It has also demonstrated utility in modeling a range of complex verbal behaviors in the laboratory, such as analogical reasoning, self-awareness, and learning via instruction (see Hughes & Barnes-Holmes, 2016;Roche & Dymond, 2013). As yet, however, only a limited number of methodologies have been developed that are capable of assessing naturalistic relational responding (e.g., Hussey, Barnes-Holmes, & Barnes-Holmes, 2015). Most notably, the social-cognitive Implicit Association Test (IAT: Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998) and the behavior-analytic Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP: Barnes-Holmes, Barnes-Holmes, Stewart, & Boles, 2011) have both been used and interpreted from within a behavior-analytic research paradigm to measure verbal histories and patterns of relational responding across a range of clinically and socially relevant domains (e.g., Gavin, Roche, Ruiz, Hogan, & O'Reilly, 2012;Ridgeway, Roche, Gavin, & Ruiz, 2010;Vahey, Nicholson, & Barnes-Holmes, 2015).…”

The Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure demonstrates poor internal consistency and test-retest reliability: A meta-analysis

“…Test-retest data was available for a subset of 8 domains with two different follow-up periods: immediate (7 domains) and 1-week (1 domain; see Figure 2). Some of this data has been published for other purposes (Drake et al, 2015(Drake et al, , 2016(Drake et al, , 2018Finn et al, 2016;Hussey, Daly, et al, 2015; see supplementary materials). However, the large majority of this data was not considered by either of the two published metaanalyses of the IRAP's reliability, with the exception of a subset of the friend-enemy IRAPs (Drake et al, 2016) which was used in Greenwald and Lai (2020).…”