Symposium 91 - Real-time Dynamics of Adolescent Suicide Risk and Interpersonal Risk Factors

Chair(s)

• JK

  John Kellerman, M.S. (he/him/his)

  PhD Student
  Rutgers University
  Piscataway, New Jersey

Discussant(s)

• 

  Evan Kleiman, Ph.D. (he/him/his)

  Assistant Professor
  Rutgers University
  Piscataway, New Jersey

Presenter(s)

• JK

  John Kellerman, M.S. (he/him/his)

  PhD Student
  Rutgers University
  Piscataway, New Jersey
• SB

  Simone Boyd, M.A.

  PhD Student
  Rutgers University
  Somerset, New Jersey
• EE

  Erika Esposito, M.A. (she/her/hers)

  University of Rochester
  New Hyde Park, New York
• RL

  Richard Liu, Ph.D. (he/him/his)

  Associate Professor
  Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School
  Boston, Massachusetts

Adolescence is a period of elevated risk for suicidal thoughts and behaviors, and the suicide rate among adolescents has sharply increased over the past decade (CDC, 2020). Recent research demonstrates that suicidal thoughts and behaviors fluctuate over short periods of hours and days (Czyz et al., 2018; Kleiman et al. 2017). However, the majority of adolescent suicide research has been conducted using methodologies (e.g., cross-sectional studies) that are not suited to adequately capture these short-term changes, limiting our understanding of the temporal dynamics of adolescent suicide risk. Further, the ways in which short-term fluctuations in established risk factors for suicide (e.g., negative affect, interpersonal stress) may contribute to momentary increases in suicidal thoughts and behaviors has received even less attention in the literature. The present symposium focuses on the real-time dynamics of suicidal thoughts and suicide risk factors across four ecological momentary assessment studies conducted with both community and clinical samples of adolescents. 

First, Presenter 1 will describe within-day fluctuations across multiple dimensions of suicidal thoughts using data from two different ecological momentary assessment studies. The findings will address optimal timescales for assessing suicidal thinking in a way that maximizes information gained while minimizing burden on participants, which has broad implications for individuals who wish to use EMA to study suicidal thinking.

Presenter 2 will discuss findings on the bidirectional relationship between adolescents’ daily experiences of positive and negative affect and  real-time affective responses to social media content and online interactions.

Presenter 3 will present dyadic ecological momentary assessment on the concurrent and prospective relationships between familial relationship quality, parental invalidation, and suicidal thoughts among a sample of high-risk transgender and gender diverse teenagers and their parents.  

Presenter 4 will conclude the symposium by describing findings from an ecological momentary assessment study showing that negative life events, particularly negative interpersonal events, predict increase next-day increases in active and passive suicidal ideation among adolescents at elevated risk for suicide.

The four presentations will be summarized and discussed by a leading expert in real-time assessment of suicidal thoughts and behaviors. His experience using ecological momentary assessment and complex multilevel analyses to study proximal changes in suicide risk among high-risk samples position him to provide insightful commentary on the presented research. This discussion will address the importance of studying suicidal thoughts and suicide risk factors as they occur in real time as well as the limitations and opportunities for innovation in the field of experience sampling methods.