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Category: Project

Description: The present preregistered study expands upon prior research by disentangling, and then separately estimating the day-level and person-level associations among loneliness and suicidal ideation. Such methodological distinction is key to the question whether experiences of loneliness are useful for assessing short-term (e.g., at vulnerable times in daily life) changes in risk or are simply associated with high (long-term) suicide risk in BPD that may likely be attributed to the coincidence with symptoms of BPD. Narrowing this gap in the literature is of substantial clinical importance because clinical risk assessments are focused on determining if individuals may engage in suicidal behavior in the near future (Kaurin et al., 2022). The current study is based on a 21-day ecological momentary assessment protocol in a clinical sample of adult BPD patients, some of whom have reported at least one attempted suicide in their past. As part of this study, another n=52 healthy controls were recruited in addition to the clinical groups; however, because these participants endorsed no suicidal ideation during the study period, they were excluded from the current analyses in line with procedures outlined in Tsypes et al. (2022). We aim to assess concurrent and lagged associations between daily levels of experienced loneliness and STBs, as well as the effect of BPD features on this within-person association. Because past suicide attempts represent one of the most reliable predictors of future suicide attempts (Black et al., 2004), this sampling approach increases the likelihood of participants reporting STBs during the study period. Moreover, the design of the study allows us to improve limitations of previous studies, such as capturing the breadth of the construct of loneliness more adequately (i.e., feeling lonely, isolated, left out).