Article archive / November 1, 2012
Originally published: . Volume 4, No. 3. Source pages: 9.
In this month’s Gumbo, I asked Dr. Gary Pettigrew, a classmate of mine from LSU to review an article that I think is important. Cognitive psychology is showing us more and more the implicit mind is at work, thank you very much Sigmund. This article grabbed my attention last year, but it popped back in while I was writing the article on veterans, and the alarmingly high suicide rates. Gary has made a study of implicit cognitive psychology, and I’m delighted he agreed to look at this article for us. He has some important links in his comment below.
• “Measuring the Suicidal Mind: Implicit Cognition Predicts Suicidal Behavior” – Journal of Psychological Science, 2010. M. Nock, et al.
Researchers found implicit associations exceed the predictive validity of known risk factors in suicide.
“The Implicit Association Test (IAT) presents one or two categories on the upper left and upper right side of a computer screen, into which the participant classifies a target word shown center screen by pressing a key on the left or a key on the right. Target words are presented in random order, and categories occasionally switch sides in a counterbalanced manner. For the suicide IAT, for example, the categories DEATH and NOT ME might appear on the left, while LIFE and ME are shown upper right. The target word "myself" is correctly classified by pressing the right-hand key, as it belongs to one of the categories on that side. After all trials, if it was much easier (more efficient in speed and accuracy) to classify ME words when that category was on the same side as the DEATH category, a strong implicit (subconscious) association between those categories would be calculated for the patient performing this task.
“A recent Psychological Science article (Nock et al., 2010) reported that patients presenting to the emergency department after a suicide attempt had a significantly stronger implicit association between ME and DEATH than those with other psychiatric complaints.
“More impressively, this association predicted future suicide attempts during six-month follow-up better than the patient's own prediction or other clinical factors studied. Patients with this IAT result were six times more likely to make another attempt. Previous IAT studies have also shown potential for clinical utility, including the issues of anxiety, alcoholism, emotional self-regulation, and self esteem.
“Downloadable research articles can be found at http://www.projectimplicit.net/papers.html and a Windows computer application to use the IAT method may be downloaded from http://www.savetimesoftware.com/ ”
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