magazine issue 2 2012 / Issue 14

When the thought of yourself nags you: How failure to attain cultural standards brings suicide on the fringe of consciousness

• written by Leila Selimbegović & Armand Chatard
• edited by Daniel Sligte

As expected, participants in the failure condition showed greater suicide-thought accessibility than participants in the other two conditions. This result corroborates the idea of a direct link between failure and increased suicide-thought accessibility. In addition, self-consciousness and escapist motivations moderated the effect of failure, such that only those who had high scores on both of these personality characteristics reacted to failure with increased suicide thought accessibility as compared to the other two conditions. Death-related thought accessibility did not reflect a similar pattern, indicating that the increase in suicide-thought accessibility is not due to a more general increase in death-related content.

Another study (Chatard & Selimbegović, 2011, Study 2) yielded replication of the link between failure and increased suicide-thought accessibility in a country with high standards of living (Switzerland). In contrast, parallel results were not observed in a country with low standards of living (Côte d’Ivoire). In this study, Swiss and Ivorian participants wrote about unemployment (as in the previous study) or not. Importantly, unemployment is low in Switzerland and high in Côte d’Ivoire. Hence, it represents a greater discrepancy from the standard in Switzerland than in Côte d’Ivoire. Consistent with expectations, the idea of being unemployed increased suicide thought accessibility in Switzerland but not in Côte d’Ivoire.

In yet another study (Chatard & Selimbegović, 2011, Study 3), Swiss participants first reported their subjective happiness. They were then exposed to a newspaper article reporting that more than 90% of the Swiss declare being satisfied with their working and housing conditions and the balance between professional and family life. Once again, those who failed to reach the standard (i.e., the unhappy), but not those who matched it (i.e., the happy) showed an increase in suicide-thought accessibility. Interestingly, in this study, participants were reminded of something positive (high life satisfaction). It thus seems that even positive contents can bring suicide to mind (these results were conceptually replicated in the Czech Republic, Chatard & Selimbegović, 2011, Study 4).

As underlined before, people have ways to escape other than suicide, and if suicide reaches consciousness it is likely to be rejected as a “solution” (Shneidman, 1996). Some ways of coping include using substances that alter the state of consciousness (e.g., alcohol and drugs, Carver et al., 1989). If such behaviors serve the function of escape, then failure should increase the desire to use these substances. This idea was put to test in Chatard and Selimbegović’s (2011) fifth study, carried out with regular marijuana smokers as participants. They were asked to recall either their greatest failure in life (failure condition), or the situation that provoked their greatest anger (control condition). Importantly, both situations were negative, but anger was not expected to increase suicide thought accessibility. Additionally, participants were asked when they would roll their next joint. Results showed that suicide was more accessible and that participants intended to smoke marijuana sooner in the failure than in the anger condition.

The last study (Chatard & Selimbegović, 2011, Study 6) aimed to show that cognitive accessibility of concepts related to escape and relief increases under the same conditions as suicide-thought accessibility does. Young female participants first reported their body satisfaction (Garner, Olmstead, & Polivy, 1983). They were next presented either a slim top model (an unattainable standard, modified in Photoshop – failure condition), or a more realistic model (also modified in Photoshop – control condition), before taking part in a lexical decision task. Letter strings were presented one by one on a computer screen. Participants’ task was to indicate for each letter string whether or not it was a word. Among words, some were suicide-related, some were escape- and relief-related, and some were neutral. Response times were collected by the computer. The more a concept is accessible, the quicker the participants should be to identify a related word. Indeed, participants in the failure condition were quicker to identify escape- and suicide-related words than those in the control condition. This effect increased as body satisfaction decreased, and was not found on neutral words. Needless to say, participants’ body mass index indicated they were quite normal according to medical standards. Interestingly, suicide increased in accessibility along with escape-related concepts such as “calm” or “peace”.

Conclusions

Taken together, these findings show that failure to attain standards of value can make thoughts of suicide increasingly accessible. Furthermore, this effect is associated with a motivation to escape self-awareness, and is particularly strong when failure is important. Importantly, the observed pattern cannot be explained by an increase in death-related thought accessibility, and thus seems to be specific to thoughts of suicide. These results concord with theories of self-awareness and suicide as escape, as well as with recent theoretical insights about the cognitive underpinnings of motivation.