(PS13-11) Negative Emotion Reactivity as a Proximal Predictor of Suicide Ideation Among Young Adults

Young adults in the United States have the highest rate of past-year suicidal ideation and their rate of suicidal ideation has progressively increased in recent years (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 2020, 2023). Despite more than 50 years of suicide research, we still cannot accurately predict which young adults will experience suicidal ideation, in part, due to the frequent use of long-term follow-up periods (Franklin et al., 2017). There is growing evidence that negative emotion reactivity (i.e., sensitivity, intensity, and persistence of negative emotions) is a proximal predictor of suicidal ideation among emerging adults (Nock et al., 2008). Four longitudinal studies showed that negative emotion reactivity was positively associated with suicidal ideation one-week (Selby et al., 2012), six-months (Chiang et al., 2023; Wu et al., 2023), and one-year later (Polanco-Roman et al., 2018) among adolescents and young adults. One of these studies examined the relationship between two of the three individual components of emotion reactivity and suicidal ideation, showing that negative emotion sensitivity, but not intensity, predicted suicidal ideation one-week later (Selby et al., 2012). However, it is unclear how all three components of negative emotion reactivity (sensitivity, intensity, and persistence) are proximally related to suicidal ideation. Therefore, this study replicated and extended previous research by determining how the three individual components of negative emotion reactivity proximally predict suicidal ideation over two weeks among young adults. College students (N = 43) with a lifetime history of suicidal ideation completed questionnaires three times per day for two weeks. Participants only reported emotion reactivity in response to negative life events. When sensitivity, intensity, and persistence of emotions were simultaneously entered in a random effects two-level linear mixed model to predict intensity of suicidal ideation, higher average levels of negative emotion sensitivity predicted average intensity of suicidal ideation across the two weeks of observation (B = 0.69 [SE = 0.30], p = .02), but negative emotion intensity and persistence were not related to average intensity of suicidal ideation (p’s > .05). In addition, greater individual within-person fluctuations in negative emotion sensitivity (B = 0.27 [SE = 0.13], p = .04) and negative emotion persistence (B = 0.26 [SE = 0.09], p = .003) predicted real-time intensity of suicidal ideation, but negative emotion intensity was not related to real-time intensity of suicidal ideation (p > .05). These results suggest that a greater degree of emotional sensitivity to negative life events compared to others increases short-term risk for suicidal ideation. Further, experiencing a greater degree of emotional sensitivity and a longer duration of emotions to negative life events compared to usual for oneself increases short-term risk for suicidal ideation.