Developing the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure(IRAP) to Assess Evaluations of Death Within Suicidality
Year: 2015
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Over the last fifty years, psychological science can be credited with persistent efforts\nto prevent and treat suicidal behaviours. However, the utility of such interventions is often\nmoderated by the ability to identity individuals who are likely to engage in suicidal behaviors\nahead of time. Less progress has been made on this front; the ability to accurately predict\nsuch behaviors at an individual level remains limited. Recent evidence suggests that this may\nbe due in part to the field’s reliance on self-report measures. One promising avenue that has\nemerged in recent years is the objective behavioural tasks referred to as “implicit measures”,\nwhich have shown greater promising predictive validity relative to existing risk factors\nderived from self-report measures. The current body of research sought to expand on these\nfindings and, specifically, to explore implicit evaluations of death in both normative and\nsuicidal individuals using the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP).\nThis thesis begins with a systematic review of the literature on implicit measures and\nsuicide. Based on the conclusions of this review, five analogue studies were conducted\nexploring implicit studies to death in normative student populations. Two further experiments\ndeveloped a novel experimental methodology (i.e., manipulations of the IRAP’s “contrast\ncategory”) in order to facilitate a more detailed understanding of what drives effects on the\nmeasure. A final experiment compared implicit death-evaluations on the IRAP between\npsychiatric patients with current suicidal ideation and normative controls. All studies\npresented participants with one or more implicit measures (IRAP and IAT) and a number of\nself-report measures. Generically, the IRAP presents participants with four category pairings\n(e.g., “life-positive”, “life-negative”, “death-positive”, and “death-negative”), and compares\nthe relative ease with which they respond to these pairings with “true” relative to “false”. The\ndifference in mean response-latency between the two response options is referred to as an\nimplicit bias.\nTogether, these studies allowed for a more detailed interrogation of how death is\nevaluated between individuals with and without a history of suicidal behaviours than was\npreviously possible. Specifically, across studies, results demonstrated the IRAP’s ability to\nisolate specific implicit biases between categories, relative to other measures. The results\nfrom the analogue studies were used to development and assess a death-evaluation IRAP that\nis sensitive to mortality salience. A final experiment to conclude that suicidal ideation was\nfound to be associated with a specific rejection of the negativity (i.e., fearlessness) of death.\nResults across studies indicate that differential patterns of implicit bias between\nnormative individuals and suicidal ideators were attributable to suicidality specifically rather\nthan the salience of mortality more generally, thereby providing a degree of construct validity\nfor death-evaluations on the IRAP. Importantly, these effects are consistent with leading\ntheories of suicide (e.g., Interpersonal Theory and Integrated Motivational-Volitional model),\nand are in line with our stated goal to attempt to ground the effects found on implicit\nmeasures more closely with existing theory. Overall, results suggest that the assessment of\nimplicit death-evaluations on the IRAP represents a good candidate for future research on the\nprospective prediction of suicidal behaviours.
Author: Ian Hussey
Language: English
Subfield: Clinical Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2596391402