Department of Psychology.
J Pers Soc Psychol. 2019 Nov;117(5):978-997. doi: 10.1037/pspi0000180. Epub 2019 Mar 14.
Thwarted social connection is a critical risk factor for suicidality, and several theoretical perspectives highlight the importance of interpersonal affect to social connection. Given that marriage is an increasingly important source of social connection, we examined the role of automatic spousal attitudes-conceptualized as spontaneously activated affective associations involving one's spouse-in predicting suicidal thoughts in 3 longitudinal studies of married couples. Studies 1a ( = 204) and 1b ( = 159) demonstrated that more positive automatic spousal attitudes, assessed implicitly shortly after the marriage as the speed with which people categorized positive relative to negative words following photo-primes of their spouse, were associated with a weakened probability of the self-reported suicidal thoughts 1 year later. Study 2 ( = 229) provided further evidence that automatic spousal attitudes predict suicidal thoughts by showing that newly conditioned automatic spousal attitudes predicted suicidal thoughts. In that study, more positive automatic spousal attitudes exhibited after an evaluative conditioning procedure were associated with a reduced probability of suicidal thoughts 2 months later. Across studies, an increase (1 SD) in automatic spousal attitudes was associated with approximately a 50% decreased probability of suicidal thought. In all 3 studies, implicitly measured spousal attitudes captured variance in suicidal thoughts not captured by implicitly measured attitudes toward oneself and self-reported marital satisfaction, both of which proved to be less reliable predictors of suicidal thoughts. These findings highlight the importance of automatic interpersonal processes to well-being generally and suicidality specifically, and may thereby suggest novel methods for reducing risk of suicidality. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
社交联系受阻是自杀的一个关键风险因素，有几个理论视角强调了人际情感对社交联系的重要性。鉴于婚姻是越来越重要的社交联系来源，我们在 3 项关于已婚夫妇的纵向研究中检验了自动配偶态度（即对配偶的自动激活的情感联想，概念化为涉及一个人的配偶的自发激活的情感联想）对自杀想法的预测作用。研究 1a（n = 204）和 1b（n = 159）表明，更积极的自动配偶态度，即配偶照片呈现后人们对积极词和消极词的分类速度，在短期内（婚姻后不久）进行内隐评估，与 1 年后自我报告的自杀想法的可能性降低有关。研究 2（n = 229）进一步提供了自动配偶态度预测自杀想法的证据，表明新形成的自动配偶态度预测自杀想法。在这项研究中，在评价性条件作用程序后表现出更积极的自动配偶态度与 2 个月后自杀想法的可能性降低有关。在所有 3 项研究中，自动配偶态度的增加（1 个标准差）与自杀想法的可能性降低约 50%有关。在所有 3 项研究中，内隐测量的配偶态度捕捉到了自杀想法的变化，而内隐测量的对自己的态度和自我报告的婚姻满意度则没有捕捉到这些变化，这两者被证明是自杀想法的预测指标不太可靠。这些发现强调了自动人际过程对幸福感（包括自杀）的重要性，并且可能为降低自杀风险提供新的方法。
