2 - (SYM 104) Latent Profiles of Emotion Coping Behaviors Among College Students with Suicide Thinking

Empirical and clinical observations suggest that thinking about suicide may serve emotion regulation functions, such as avoidance and escape from negative emotions. Broadening or changing the coping repertoire of individuals with suicidal thinking may help replace suicide thinking with other emotion regulation strategies. Nevertheless, research on suicide thinking and coping behaviors is limited. This study aimed to advance the understanding of the link between suicide urges and emotion/distress-coping behaviors thereby informing timely and appropriate intervention to increase effective coping behavior or to replace ineffective with effective behaviors for people with suicide urges.

The current study involved 334 college students (mean age = 19.56, 70.36% cisgender women, 47.01% Asian, 34.43% White) who completed ecological momentary assessments (6 times per day) that included questions about suicide urges as well as daily questions of whether they engaged in a variety of behaviors to regulate emotion or stress (e.g., tried to fix the problem, kept mind off it by doing something else) for 8 weeks. We conducted latent profile analysis (LPA) to derive subgroups of students based on their patterns of coping behaviors including suicidal thinking. The best fitting LPA had three profiles, which differed in the proportion of days they reported suicide thinking. Results suggested that while some students reported low frequency of any coping behaviors including suicide thinking, there tends to be a trade-off between engagement in suicide thinking and using other coping behaviors, confirming that an increase in alternative behaviors probably co-occurs with less frequent suicide thinking. This highlights the importance of arming college students with a variety of alternative coping strategies to turn to when suicidal urges arise. Future research could benefit from similar methodological approaches of leveraging profile analyses to better understand clusters of individuals with elevated likelihood of experiencing suicidal thinking.