Under the Surface: The Role of Covert Cues in Peer Suicide Risk Referrals.

Suicidal thoughts and behaviors are highly prevalent among adolescents, and peers are often the first, and sometimes only, people to know about youth suicidality. Since many adolescents do not directly disclose suicidal thoughts, school-based suicide prevention programs aim to train youth to recognize warning signs of suicide in their peers that serve as "cues" to refer at-risk peers to an appropriate adult. However, peer-presented cues vary widely in presentation, and adolescents are more likely to recognize overt (i.e., obvious or explicit) as opposed to covert (i.e., hidden or implied) cues. The type of cue exhibited may, in turn, affect whether adolescents make a referral to an adult. The current study examined whether training suicide prevention influences referral intentions for overt and covert suicide cues. Participants included 244 high school students (54% female; M age = 16.21) in the Southeastern United States who received suicide prevention training (SOS; Signs of Suicide) as part of their health curriculum. Prior to training, students endorsed higher referral intentions for peers exhibiting overt compared to covert cues. Training was associated with increased intentions to refer peers across cue type, but referral intentions for covert cues improved significantly from pre to post-training while those for overt cues remained high and stable. Findings suggest that suicide prevention training might differentially improve students' ability to detect and respond appropriately to less obvious indicators of suicide risk. These findings may inform the adaptation and development of future, more nuanced school-based suicide prevention programming.

Childhood emotional invalidation and right hemispheric mu suppression during a pain empathy task: An EEG study.

Empathy is a critical aspect of social behavior, and impairment in empathic processing is linked to hindered social interactions and several disorders. Despite much interest in this topic, our understanding of the developmental and neural involvement for empathic processing is limited. Recent evidence suggests the Mirror Neuron System (MNS) may play a role in this behavior, and that mu rhythm suppression found over the sensorimotor cortices may be a proxy for the MNS. Therefore, we aimed to measure mu rhythm oscillations in response to empathic processing during observation of painful action-based situations using electroencephalogram (EEG). Our second goal was to examine how perceived parental emotional invalidation (EI) during childhood may relate to empathy and influence mu suppression. Our results showed that mu rhythm suppression was strongest over the right hemisphere. EI had a significant influence on this suppression between painful and non-painful images, and was negatively correlated with behavioral measures of empathy. Our findings suggest that perceived childhood EI may decrease empathizing abilities and influence neural responses to the painful experiences of others. Implications from this study could entail clinical intervention targeted at emotional invalidation to foster the healthy development of empathy.

Behaviour vs. perception: An investigation into the components of emotional invalidation.

BACKGROUND: The negative effects of emotionally invalidating environments are theorized by the biosocial theory of borderline personality disorder to be vast and severe. However, findings from studies on the impact of emotional invalidation (EI) vary, perhaps due to different operational definitions of EI. The current investigation seeks to explore the relationship between the objective behavioural observations of EI and recipient's subjective perceptions of experiencing these behaviours. METHOD: First, 58 participants watched scripted interactions between a confederate and a mock participant and identified the presence of invalidating and/or neutral behaviours. Next, 92 participants engaged in one-on-one interactions with a confederate utilizing the same scripted interactions observed by the first set of participants. RESULTS: While the first set of participants identified invalidating behaviours accurately and consistently, the participants who experienced the behaviours demonstrated more variability in their perceptions of the behaviours as emotionally invalidating. CONCLUSION: These preliminary findings demonstrate that the objective existence of emotionally invalidating behaviours are likely not the same as the experienced perception of EI across individuals, highlighting the need to examine how EI is operationally defined and measured. Future research should examine what individual characteristics may play a role in perceiving behaviours as emotionally invalidating. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Examining the relationship between childhood sexual abuse and borderline personality disorder: does social support matter?

The relationship between childhood sexual abuse and borderline personality disorder is a prominent issue in the etiological research on borderline personality disorder. This study further explored the relationship between childhood sexual abuse and the development of borderline personality features while evaluating the moderating role of a primary social support source in a sample of 290 female undergraduate students enrolled at a major southeastern university. Consistent with previous research, retrospective self-reports of childhood sexual abuse and low social support were both positively correlated with current borderline personality features. It was hypothesized that the presence of a supportive relationship at the time the childhood sexual abuse occurred would moderate the relationship between childhood sexual abuse and borderline personality features. This moderation hypothesis was not supported in the current study, but post-hoc analyses reveal the need to further examine how we define social support following childhood sexual abuse. This research is a stepping stone toward the prevention of borderline personality disorder following childhood sexual abuse.