Suicide-related construct accessibility and attention disengagement bias in suicide ideation

Previous attempts to determine whether attention bias toward suicide-related stimuli is associated with risk for future suicide attempts have yielded mixed findings that have been difficult to replicate. Recent evidence suggests that methods used to assess attention bias toward suicide-specific stimuli have low reliability. The present study used a modified attention disengagement and construct accessibility task to examine suicide-specific disengagement biases, along with cognitive accessibility of suicide-related stimuli, among young adults with different histories of suicide ideation. Young adults (N = 125; 79% women), screened for moderate-to-high levels of anxiety or depressive symptoms completed an attention disengagement and lexical decision (cognitive accessibility) task, along with self-report measures of suicide ideation and clinical covariates. Findings using generalized linear mixed-effects modeling revealed that young adults with recent suicide ideation displayed a suicide-specific facilitated disengagement bias, compared to peers with lifetime ideation. In contrast, there was no evidence of a construct accessibility bias for suicide-specific stimuli, irrespective of suicide ideation history. These findings point to a suicide-specific disengagement bias that may depend on the recency of suicidal thoughts and suggests automatic processing of suicide-specific information. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).