Exploring the Implicit Emotional Valence of Death in Recent Suicide Attempters with a Novel Personalized Death Implicit Association Test

Aschenbrenner, Lara Marie; Frei, Adriana; Forkmann, Thomas; Rath, Dajana; Glaesmer, Heide; Brüdern, Juliane; Stein, Maria; Walther, Sebastian; Gysin-Maillart, Anja (8 May 2024). Exploring the Implicit Emotional Valence of Death in Recent Suicide Attempters with a Novel Personalized Death Implicit Association Test (Unpublished). In: 4. Gemeinsamer Kongress der AGNP und DGBP 2024. Berlin, Germany. 08.05. - 10.05.2024.

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Background: The Death Implicit Association Test (D-IAT) uncovers unconscious self-death links without measuring the emotional valence of death. Supplementing the D-IAT with emotional attitudes may provide insights into implicit evaluations of death. However, associating items with attitude objects provokes retrieving irrelevant information stored in memory, which contaminates the attitude estimate with extrapersonal associations. Addiction and social psychology research developed IAT variants that prioritise personal over extrapersonal influences to address this issue. This study investigates whether the implicit emotional valence of death measured with a personalised D-IAT is more positive in patients with recent suicide attempts compared to non-attempters. Methods: We applied the conventional D-IAT and a novel D-IAT, probing the association between “death” and “I like” in N = 90 subjects. We compared recent suicide attempters (n = 45) with non-attempters (n = 45). A ROC analysis was conducted to evaluate the discriminative ability of the personalised D-IAT in correctly identifying suicide attempters compared to the conventional D-IAT.Results: The personalised D-IAT revealed significant differences between suicide attempters and non-attempters (p = .004), indicating a stronger association between “I like” and “death” in attempters. The conventional D-IAT did not yield a group difference. ROC analysis demonstrated improved discriminative ability in predicting suicide attempt group assignment for the personalised D-IAT (AUC = .609, p = .033), surpassing the conventional D-IAT (AUC = .551, p = .324).Discussion: Our study aligns with and extends findings from suicide research that explore implicit associations with death. Using a personalised D-IAT, we captured a more positive implicit emotional association with death in recent suicide attempters compared to non-attempters. The novel variant also outperformed the conventional D-IAT in discriminative ability. The personalised D-IAT emerges as a valuable tool for refining implicit attitude assessments in suicide research, prompting further exploration of its clinical utility and generalisability.

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