Implicit and explicit attitudes toward self harm: support for a functional model.

Area of Science:

• Psychology
• Public Health
• Behavioral Science

Background:

• Self harm (SH) is a significant global public health concern.
• Implicit attitude measures offer a novel approach to understanding SH.
• Previous research has explored explicit attitudes, but implicit associations remain less understood.

Purpose of the Study:

• To examine implicit evaluative and arousal associations with self harm (SH).
• To compare the predictive power of implicit and explicit attitude measures in a high-risk, non-clinical sample.
• To investigate the relationship between implicit attitudes and the functions of SH.

Main Methods:

• Two experiments utilized the Go No-Go Association Task (GNAT) to assess implicit attitudes toward SH.
• Participants included an undergraduate sample, with a subset identified as high-risk for SH.
• Logistic regression and reaction time analyses were employed.

Main Results:

• Explicit measures, not implicit, significantly discriminated between SH cases and controls, contrasting prior research.
• Both SH cases and controls showed faster reaction times for negative implicit associations (SH and 'dislike') compared to positive ones (SH and 'like').
• The SH group exhibited faster responses to arousal-associated implicit stimuli than sedation-associated ones, linking internal motivations to sedation and interpersonal motivations to arousal.

Conclusions:

• Findings support the hypothesized roles of automatic affect regulation and social/interpersonal functions in self harm.
• Implicit associations with SH may relate to the regulation of emotions and social interactions.
• Further longitudinal research is needed to determine if these implicit attitudes can predict future self harm behavior.