Use of Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) in Non-Suicidal Self-Injury (NSSI): A systematic review

Does higher‐than‐usual stress predict nonsuicidal self‐injury? Evidence from two prospective studies in adolescent and emerging adult females

“…Results suggest that young people may have a unique stress threshold wherein an upward shift in stress may be associated with NSSI risk regardless of mean stress levels relative to others. Further, results are consistent with previous EMA studies that show how increased within‐person negative affect predicts NSSI over the course of next few hours (Rodríguez‐Blanco et al., ).…”

“…cortisol as a marker of HPA axis) that subside within minutes and hours for most (Gunnar & Quevedo, ). As a result, we believe that data on the level of minutes and hours, as gathered from EMA or passive data collection, are better suited to examine whether higher‐than‐usual stress now predicts NSSI risk in the next few minutes or hours, similar to work on negative affect (Rodríguez‐Blanco et al., ). Importantly, across all studies, findings were over and above the effects of prior NSSI (Study 1), age, and depression (symptom or diagnosis; Studies 1 and 2).…”

“…Increasingly, researchers have advocated for adopting within‐person approaches to understanding the relationship between stress and NSSI (Hamza & Willoughby, ). A handful of studies using ecological momentary assessment (EMA) methodologies with adults have provided insight into within‐person associations between affective states and NSSI (Rodríguez‐Blanco, Carballo, & Baca‐García, ), but these studies have not yet examined risk for NSSI in the context of within‐person fluctuations in stress among adolescents and emerging adults.…”

Emotional Response Inhibition: A Shared Neurocognitive Deficit in Eating Disorder Symptoms and Nonsuicidal Self-Injury

“…Consistent with this notion, the most commonly reported function of NSSI and ED behaviors is to reduce negative affect [19][20][21][22][23][24][25]. Ecological momentary assessment corroborates the idea that direct and indirect self-injury are both motivated by a desire to alleviate unpleasant emotional states, as increased negative affect proximally predicts episodes of NSSI, dysregulated eating, and compensatory behaviors [26][27][28][29][30][31][32].Much like emotion dysregulation, impulsivity is implicated in various psychiatric disorders and self-injurious behaviors. This multifaceted construct encompasses several subfactors, including impulsive personality traits and impulsive behavior, or motor impulsivity.…”

“…Negative urgency is also associated with self-reported emotion regulation difficulties in NSSI and ED symptoms [42,43] and might thus represent an area of overlap between facets of emotion dysregulation and impulsivity common to both NSSI and disordered eating [10][11][12][33][34][35][36][42][43][44]. Accordingly, NSSI and disordered eating may frequently co-occur due to shared tendencies to react impulsively to distress, given the desire to rapidly reduce negative affect that promotes maladaptive coping strategies to "escape" these undesirable feelings, e.g., [10][11][12][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][42][43][44][45].Elevated negative urgency may be a consequence of inhibitory control deficits that specifically arise in negative emotional contexts. For example, NSSI is associated with risky decision-making in response to critical feedback (eliciting negative affect) such that individuals with NSSI history are more likely to make impulsive choices during negative mood, but not necessarily in its absence [46].…”