SELF-FORGIVENESS AND SUICIDE RISK IN VETERANS: EXAMINING SERIAL LINKAGES OF SHAME AND INTERPERSONAL NEEDS
Location
Ballroom
Start Date
4-5-2018 8:00 AM
End Date
4-5-2018 12:00 PM
Poster Number
61
Faculty Sponsor’s Department
Accountancy
Name of Project's Faculty Sponsor
Jameson K. Hirsch, Ph.D.
Faculty Sponsor's Department
Psychology
Type
Poster: Competitive
Project's Category
Social and Behavioral Sciences
Abstract or Artist's Statement
Veterans in America are at 22% increased risk for suicide compared to the general population, perhaps due to military experiences (e.g., killing another person) that contribute to maladaptive cognitive-emotional functioning, including feelings of self-blame. A lack of self-forgiveness may maintain feelings of shame, conceptualized as humiliation or distress following perception of having behaved wrongly, which may, further, deleteriously impact interpersonal functioning, increasing suicide risk. Shame may lead an individual to withdraw from others, resulting in thwarted belongingness (i.e., a perception of a lack of membership with a group), and may contribute to feeling like a burden (i.e., a perception of being taxing or restrictive to others), both of which are known predictors of suicide. The ability to forgive the self, however, may reduce feelings of shame and, in turn, improve interpersonal functioning and suicide risk; yet, this model has not been previously tested. At the bivariate level, we hypothesized that shame, perceived burdensomeness, thwarted belongingness, and suicide risk would all be positively related, and that they would all be inversely related to self-forgiveness. At the multivariate level, we tested two serial mediation models, hypothesizing that the relation between self-forgiveness and suicide risk would be mediated by shame (1st order) and perceived burdensomeness/thwarted belongingness (2nd order), such that lower levels of self-forgiveness would be associated with greater perceptions of shame and, in turn, to greater perceptions of burdensomeness and thwarted belongingness, and consequent greater suicide risk. Participants (N=551; Mean Age=50.4, SD=16.6) were recruited via online invitations distributed to veteran social media groups and were predominantly male (n=382, 69.3%) and White (n=469, 85.1%). Participants completed Fetzer’s Brief Multidimensional Measure of Religiousness and Spirituality (BMMRS), the Differential Emotions Scale (DES-IV), the Interpersonal Needs Questionnaire (INQ), and the Suicide Behaviors Questionnaire – Revised (SBQR). Bivariate correlations and multivariate analyses were conducted via the SPSS PROCESS macro (Hayes, 2013), covarying age, race, and sex, and utilizing a 10,000 bootstrapping sample. All bivariate hypotheses were supported at the pβ=.102, p=.437) when shame and perceived burdensomeness were added to the model (β=.642, pβ=.048, p=.733) when shame and thwarted belongingness were added to the model (β=.630, p
SELF-FORGIVENESS AND SUICIDE RISK IN VETERANS: EXAMINING SERIAL LINKAGES OF SHAME AND INTERPERSONAL NEEDS
Ballroom
Veterans in America are at 22% increased risk for suicide compared to the general population, perhaps due to military experiences (e.g., killing another person) that contribute to maladaptive cognitive-emotional functioning, including feelings of self-blame. A lack of self-forgiveness may maintain feelings of shame, conceptualized as humiliation or distress following perception of having behaved wrongly, which may, further, deleteriously impact interpersonal functioning, increasing suicide risk. Shame may lead an individual to withdraw from others, resulting in thwarted belongingness (i.e., a perception of a lack of membership with a group), and may contribute to feeling like a burden (i.e., a perception of being taxing or restrictive to others), both of which are known predictors of suicide. The ability to forgive the self, however, may reduce feelings of shame and, in turn, improve interpersonal functioning and suicide risk; yet, this model has not been previously tested. At the bivariate level, we hypothesized that shame, perceived burdensomeness, thwarted belongingness, and suicide risk would all be positively related, and that they would all be inversely related to self-forgiveness. At the multivariate level, we tested two serial mediation models, hypothesizing that the relation between self-forgiveness and suicide risk would be mediated by shame (1st order) and perceived burdensomeness/thwarted belongingness (2nd order), such that lower levels of self-forgiveness would be associated with greater perceptions of shame and, in turn, to greater perceptions of burdensomeness and thwarted belongingness, and consequent greater suicide risk. Participants (N=551; Mean Age=50.4, SD=16.6) were recruited via online invitations distributed to veteran social media groups and were predominantly male (n=382, 69.3%) and White (n=469, 85.1%). Participants completed Fetzer’s Brief Multidimensional Measure of Religiousness and Spirituality (BMMRS), the Differential Emotions Scale (DES-IV), the Interpersonal Needs Questionnaire (INQ), and the Suicide Behaviors Questionnaire – Revised (SBQR). Bivariate correlations and multivariate analyses were conducted via the SPSS PROCESS macro (Hayes, 2013), covarying age, race, and sex, and utilizing a 10,000 bootstrapping sample. All bivariate hypotheses were supported at the pβ=.102, p=.437) when shame and perceived burdensomeness were added to the model (β=.642, pβ=.048, p=.733) when shame and thwarted belongingness were added to the model (β=.630, p