Citation

Cha CB, Najmi S, Park JM, Finn CT, Nock MK. J. Abnorm. Psychol. 2010; 119(4): 874.

Affiliation

Department of Psychology, Harvard University.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2010, American Psychological Association)

DOI

10.1037/a0021512

PMID

21090882

Abstract

Reports an error in "Attentional bias toward suicide-related stimuli predicts suicidal behavior" by Christine B. Cha, Sadia Najmi, Jennifer M. Park, Christine T. Finn and Matthew K. Nock (Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 2010[Aug], Vol 119[3], 616-622). The description of the Stroop task on pp. 617-618 should have noted that each trial started with a blank white screen for 4 s followed by a centered "+" for 1 s, another blank screen for 1 s, and then the word; and in addition to suicide-related, negative, and neutral words, 12 of the 48 test trials also included positive words (happy, success, pleasure). Exploratory analyses showed that there was no evidence of an attentional bias toward these positive words. All analyses and results are accurate as reported in the manuscript. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2010-15289-018.) A long-standing challenge for scientific and clinical work on suicidal behavior is that people often are motivated to deny or conceal suicidal thoughts. The authors proposed that people considering suicide would possess an objectively measurable attentional bias toward suicide-related stimuli and that this bias would predict future suicidal behavior. Participants were 124 adults presenting to a psychiatric emergency department who were administered a modified emotional Stroop task and followed for 6 months. Suicide attempters showed an attentional bias toward suicide-related words relative to neutral words, and this bias was strongest among those who had made a more recent attempt. Importantly, this suicide-specific attentional bias predicted which people made a suicide attempt over the next 6 months, above and beyond other clinical predictors. Attentional bias toward more general negatively valenced words did not predict any suicide-related outcomes, supporting the specificity of the observed effect. These results suggest that suicide-specific attentional bias can serve as a behavioral marker for suicidal risk, and ultimately improve scientific and clinical work on suicide-related outcomes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved).

Language: en