Implicit Attitudes and Pain Offset Relief: Implications for Development of Nonsuicidal Self-Injury (2012)

Undergraduate: Megan Puzia

Faculty Advisor: Gabriel Dichter
Department: Psychology & Neuroscience

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Non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) is defined as the direct, purposeful and socially unacceptable damage to one’s own body tissue in the absence of suicidal intent (e.g., cutting or burning one’s skin). Understanding why and how NSSI develops and is maintained could have important clinical implications for its treatment and prevention. Our knowledge about NSSI has increased over the past decade, particularly relevant to attitudes towards NSSI, but there are still many facets of the behavior that remain poorly understood. In particular, one of the most important gaps in the literature is in regards to how positive attitudes towards NSSI might develop. The present study seeks to directly test the hypothesis that pain offset relief conditioning can lead to the development of positive attitudes towards NSSI. To do this, a pain offset conditioning paradigm was used to attempt to influence the attitudes towards images of NSSI of participants without a history of self-injury. Four measures of attitudes towards NSSI were utilized in a pre-post design: performance-based measures of implicit associations (IAT) and implicit affect (AMP), a biological measure of implicit affect (startle eyeblink reactivity), and self-report assessment of explicit attitudes. It was found that when implicit attitudes were measured using startle eyeblink reactivity pain offset relief conditioning led to significant attitude change, creating more positive attitudes towards NSSI.