The decision neuroscience perspective on suicidal behavior
Year: 2016
Type: review
Abstract: PURPOSE OF REVIEW: Suicide attempts are usually regretted by people who survive them. Furthermore, addiction and gambling are over-represented among people who attempt or die by suicide, raising the question whether their decision-making is impaired. Advances in decision neuroscience have enabled us to investigate decision processes in suicidal people and to elucidate putative neural substrates of disadvantageous decision-making. RECENT FINDINGS: Early studies have linked attempted suicide to poor performance on gambling tasks. More recently, functional MRI augmented with a reinforcement learning computational model revealed that impaired decision-making in suicide attempters is paralleled by disrupted expected value (expected reward) signals in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Behavioral studies have linked increased delay discounting to low-lethality/poorly planned attempts, multiple attempts, and the co-occurrence of attempted suicide and addiction. This behavioral tendency may be related to altered integrity of the basal ganglia. By contrast, well-planned, serious suicide attempts were associated with intact/diminished delay discounting. One study has linked high-lethality suicide attempts and impaired social decision-making. SUMMARY: This emerging literature supports the notion that various impairments in decision-making - often broadly related to impulsivity - may mark different pathways to suicide. We propose that aggressive and self-destructive responses to social stressors in people prone to suicide result from a predominance of automatic, Pavlovian processes over goal-directed computations.
Source: Current Opinion in Psychiatry
Institutions: Pennsylvania State University, University of Pittsburgh
Language: English
Subfield: Clinical Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
Awards: Reward Learning in Late-Life Suicidal Behavior, Neurodevelopmental Origins of Emotion Dysregulation in Borderline Personality, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience of Decision-Making in Late-Life Suicide, Screening For Inhibitors of Bacterial Capsule Biogenesis, Neurocomputational studies of mood-related momentum dynamics linking reward learning, valuation and responsivity, Decision Processes in Late-Life Suicide
OpenAlex ID: W2553902797