(PS13-45) The Influence of Emotional Intelligence on Suicide Ideation

Suicide is a widespread issue that leads to the death of thousands of people every year. Many factors have previously been associated with higher levels of suicide ideation such as the presence of depression, anxiety, loneliness, perceived burdensomeness, or thwarted belongingness. Recent research has found associations between elements of emotional intelligence and suicide ideation. The present study focused on the relationship between suicide ideation and emotional intelligence among 630 college students at a mid-size university in Texas. The findings suggested that when looking at the zero-order bivariate correlations, emotional intelligence was negatively and significantly correlated to suicide ideation with effects comparable in magnitude to other predictors. When emotional intelligence was introduced into a hierarchical regression model that included other well-established suicide predictors (depression, anxiety, panic, maladaptive coping, loneliness, thwarted belongingness, and perceived burdensomeness), emotional intelligence (specifically the component of emotional repair) captured incremental variance in the model measuring the possibility of considering suicide within the lifetime, but not in the models predicting past ideation or current risk. Nevertheless, in all models, emotional intelligence was a zero-order predictor. Perceived burdensomeness was a significant predictor in all of the hierarchical regression models, followed by loneliness, which was significant in nine of the 14 tested models. Overall, the study found components of emotional intelligence to predict suicide ideation with similar effect magnitudes to previously established suicide predictors. Further research may illuminate whether emotional intelligence plays a role in explaining how other factors, such as perceived burdensomeness and loneliness, relate to suicide ideation (i.e., via mediation), or whether emotional intelligence merely shared variance with other suicide ideation predictors. Further research with a clinical sample may increase the observed effects of our predictors and criteria as well.