Symposia
Suicide and Self-Injury
Christine B. Cha, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Teachers College, Columbia University
New York, New York
Ki Eun (Kay) Shin, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Long Island University - Post
Brookville, New York
Neha Parvez, M.A.
Lab Manager
Teachers College, Columbia University
New York, New York
Rachel J. Nam, PhD
MA Student
Teachers College, Columbia University
NY, New York
Suicidal ideation is one of the most distressing clinical outcomes that can emerge during adolescence. Suicidal ideation also commonly recurs and is difficult to treat. The present investigation aims to examine a novel, potential psychological precipitant of suicidal ideation: limited ability to imagine one’s future, or poor prospection. Prospection may play a critical role in perceiving one’s continued life, against which to contrast one’s desire for death. This is in line with seminal theories emphasizing the important role of life-oriented cognitions when suicidal individuals deliberate between life and death. Prior examinations of prospection in suicidal individuals have relied on single time-point assessments, which have limited ecological validity. To address this limitation, we present the first-ever investigation on prospection using ecological momentary assessment (EMA) to capture the quality of future-oriented thoughts as experienced by suicidal and nonsuicidal adolescents. This ongoing study recruits adolescents (15-17 yrs) who have recently experienced suicidal ideation (i.e, at least once in the past 2 weeks) and adolescents who have never experienced suicidal thoughts or behaviors, and involves completion of a 14-day EMA protocol examining multiple features of prospection including frequency, temporal distance, specificity, and function of future-oriented thoughts. Our initial sample of suicidal and nonsuicidal adolescents (n=14) reveals that when they are not thinking about the present, they more often think about the future (22.9%) compared to the past (2.9%) or something else (15.8%). These future-oriented thoughts often pertain to events that will happen later in the day (59.2%), involve oneself (59.2%), and help plan an action (38.5%). When rating on a scale of 0 (low) to 7 (high), adolescents report that they imagine their future events taking place in a specific place (M=5.8, SD=2.1), and that the imagined event is moderately vivid in nature (M=3.6, SD=2.2). Regarding examination of intra-daily experiences of prospection, results thus far suggest that we have sufficient within-person variability on key variables (e.g., vividness, spatial localization) across the 14 days, with intra-class correlations ranging from .44 to .67, indicating that 33% to 56% of variance could be attributable to within-person variability. Data collection is ongoing, and with an anticipated larger sample (n=50) we will test whether certain features of prospection (e.g., low specificity) predict near-term suicidal ideation.