(PS11-52) Exploring the Temporal Stability of Impulsivity in a Psychiatric Inpatient Population

Trait impulsivity is a risk factor for suicidal thoughts and behaviors. Impulsivity has historically been considered a stable personality trait, particularly when captured with self-reports, and is used to assess, treat and predict suicide risk. Recently, researchers are beginning to explore and test the temporal properties of impulsivity and its benefits to be used alongside retrospective measures of trait impulsiveness. Measuring how impulsivity varies over time across different populations can provide crucial knowledge for identifying future risk for suicidal thoughts and behaviors. The present study aimed to test the stability of impulsivity in an acute psychiatric population by analyzing retest reliability in general impulsivity and different facets of impulsivity over a three week period using a derived version of the Barratt Impulsivity Scale (BIS-11A) which measures impulsivity as a stable characteristic. The BIS-11A assesses three second-order facets of impulsivity via three subscales: non-planning, motor, and attentional.

Participants were psychiatric inpatients who were assigned to the Suicidal Ideation (SI) group (N= 212), Suicide Attempt (SA) group (N=36), or the Psychiatric Control (PC) group (N=30) based on presence or absence of suicidal thoughts and behaviors endorsed within a month prior to hospitalization using the Columbia Suicide Severity Rating Scale (C-SSRS). Baseline to three-week retest reliability in the total population was rtt=0.589 for the BIS-11A total score.  Baseline to three-week test-retest reliability for just the SI group was rtt = .614 for the BIS-11A total score. Test-retest reliability for the SA group’s total BIS-11A score was, rtt= .418 and rtt= .598 for the PC group. BIS-11A total scores showed poor to moderate stability across all study groups. We then compared the stability between the study groups with a series of ANOVAs and found that the SI and PC groups were not different from one another but the SA group was statistically different then both the SI and PC groups. 

The poor to moderate retest reliability contributes to previous retest reliability research using the BIS-11 by showing more variation compared to a different study with a female university student sample. The differences in test-retest reliability across our study conditions suggest that self-report questionnaires of impulsivity may perform differently within certain subgroups of acute psychiatric populations. After comparing the differences across study conditions, the SA condition showed more variation across three weeks compared to both the PC and SI conditions. The SA group could possibly be the driving force in the instability across baseline and three weeks in the total population's reliability due to its lower reliability scores. Given the increased instability of impulsivity in the SA condition, researchers may continue to test the temporal stability of trait impulsivity in this group to better understand the dynamic processes by which impulsive traits relate to problematic behaviors.