Attentional Bias Of Suicidal Attempters

Attentional bias refers to the selective allocation of attention resources to specific stimuli,and suicide attempters have a specific attentional bias toward suicidal/deathrelated content.The cognitive model of suicidal behavior suggested that attentional biases toward suicide/death-relevant stimuli accelerate suicidal crises when suiciderelevant cues were detected when a person was experiencing state hopelessness.We examined attentional biases and mechanisms of suicide attempters,suicide ideators and normal control group on different types of the stimulus(suicide/deathrelated,negative,positive and neutral)within the context of a dot-probe task using eyetracking.Since the use of one type of emotional stimulus(such as words)may not be able to summarize all emotional stimuli,the studies explored the attention biases of three groups to different emotional stimuli for two materials,namely emotional words and emotional pictures(experiment 1 and experiment 2).In addition,we also discussed the relationship between clinical variables(depression score,anxiety score,hopelessness score and suicidal ideation score)and attention biases.Experiment 1 explored the mechanisms of attentional biases toward different emotional words in suicidal attempters,suicidal ideators,and normal controls.According to the results,we found that the suicidal attempters and suicidal ideators did not show obvious attention bias to all emotional words.There was a negative correlation between the suicidal ideation score and the bias scores towards positive words,but the suicidal ideation score was not related to the bias scores towards suicide/death-related words and negative words.Attentional biases toward all emotional words were not associated with the scores of depression,anxiety,hopelessness.Using the same procedure as in Experiment 1,Experiment 2 studied the attentional bias mechanism of suicidal attempters,suicidal ideators and controls for different emotional pictures.We found that,suicide attempters had an attentional bias to suicide/death related pictures which was characterized by higher scores on total fixation times bias to suicide/death related pictures than positive pictures,and showed a specific attention pattern for suicide/death-related pictures,namely attention orientation and overall attention maintenance,without accelerated detection bias.The processing of suicide/death-related stimuli in suicide attempters was more holistic.Also,individuals’ attention biases to suicide/death-related pictures and positive pictures were significantly correlated with scores of depression,anxiety,and hopelessness.Both experiments found the absence of bias toward positive information in those who attempted suicide compared to the normal control group.The results suggested that suicide attempters showed a specific attentional bias towards suicide/death-related pictures,rather than general negative bias,compared with negative pictures 、 positive pictures and neutral pictures.And the processing of suicide/death-related stimuli in suicide attempters was more holistic.Suicidal attempters’ attention bias towards positive stimuli was significantly lower than suicide/death-related stimuli which suggested that suicidal attempters lacked a protective bias,that is,the absence of positive bias.Attention biases toward suicide/death-related information and positive information were associated with the individual’s emotional state.