Provocative Experiences Research Articles

The mediating role of non-suicidal self-injury in the relationship between impulsivity and suicidal behavior among inpatients receiving treatment for substance use disorders

Several theories posit a direct role of impulsivity in suicidal behavior. The interpersonal-psychological theory of suicidal behavior (IPTS) argues that the relationship between impulsivity and suicidal behavior is explained by the painful and/or provocative experiences (PPEs) often encountered by impulsive individuals. It thus seems plausible that nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI), itself associated with impulsivity, might account for the relationship between impulsivity and suicidal behavior. We examined data from 93 adult inpatients (54.8% male) seeking treatment for substance use disorders. Patients completed a structured interview assessing prior suicidal behavior and a series of self-report questionnaires examining impulsivity, NSSI, and psychopathology. Four impulsivity dimensions (negative urgency, positive urgency, lack of premeditation, lack of perseverance) were associated with lifetime number of suicide attempts and/or suicide potential. Furthermore, results supported our hypotheses, as all but one relation was better accounted for by NSSI and, in the one exception, the direct effect was non-significant. Findings are consistent with the IPTS and suggest that suicidal behavior may not be a direct manifestation of impulsivity, but facilitated through exposure to PPEs capable of altering an individual׳s relationship to pain and fear of death.

The Campus Spiritual Climate: Predictors of Satisfaction Among Students With Diverse Worldviews

Using data collected via the Campus Religious and Spiritual Climate Survey (CRSCS), we examined how dimensions of the campus spiritual climate shape student satisfaction. The findings reveal that structural worldview diversity, space for support and spiritual expression, and provocative experiences with worldview diversity positively relate to satisfaction, while perceptions of a divisive psychological climate undermine satisfaction. There is no compelling evidence to suggest that the relationship between campus climate dimensions and student satisfaction is conditional on religion or worldview.

Discomfort Intolerance and the Acquired Capability for Suicide

Research has yet to examine the potential relationship between discomfort intolerance and the acquired capability for suicide. However, a link between numerous constructs related to discomfort intolerance (e.g., DT, pain tolerance) and the acquired capability has been established. Although these constructs are similar to the concept of discomfort intolerance, the operational definitions associated with these variables are divergent enough to merit an investigation pertaining to the relationship between discomfort intolerance and acts of lethal self-harm. Specifically, we chose to determine whether low discomfort intolerance would be associated with elevated levels of the acquired capability for suicide. Results were consistent with the our hypothesis, revealing a significant association between discomfort intolerance and the acquired capability above and beyond the effects of sex, self-reported and behaviorally-indexed DT, pain tolerance, and prior exposure to painful and/or provocative experiences. These findings serve to clarify the role of discomfort intolerance in the acquisition of the capability required to engage in acts of lethal self-harm. Furthermore, these results emphasize the importance of enduring aversive physiological sensations in the development of the acquired capability for suicide.

Behaviorally-indexed distress tolerance and suicidality

Research indicates that distress tolerance exhibits a complicated relationship with risk factors for suicidal behavior. Specifically, low self-reported distress tolerance has been linked to perceived burdensomeness and thwarted belongingness. Contrastingly, high self-reported distress tolerance has been linked to the acquired capability for suicide. Given the frequently discrepant findings between self-report and behavioral indices of distress tolerance, we sought to expand upon prior findings by testing these relationships utilizing a behavioral measure of distress tolerance. Additionally, in an effort to further clarify the role of distress tolerance relative to painful and/or provocative experiences in the acquired capability, we examined whether distress tolerance serves as a moderator. Results revealed no significant associations between distress tolerance and burdensomeness or belongingness; however, distress tolerance was positively associated with the acquired capability. Furthermore, the interaction of distress tolerance and painful and/or provocative experiences significantly predicted the acquired capability, with the strength of the association increasing at higher levels of distress tolerance. Results highlight the potential importance of perceived versus actual ability to tolerate distress with respect to suicidal desire. In contrast, the results reflect the importance of actual persistence in the acquired capability.

Reexperiencing symptoms and the interpersonal‐psychological theory of suicidal behavior among deployed service members evaluated for traumatic brain injury

Recent evidence suggests that military suicide rates now exceed those of the general public. Numerous recent efforts to address this growing concern have focused on the interpersonal psychological theory of suicidal behavior (IPTS). In the current study, we explored the relationships among reexperiencing symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder and the three components of the IPTS in a sample of deployed military personnel examined for traumatic brain injury. Results indicated that reexperiencing symptoms were directly related to the acquired capability for suicide, but their relationships to perceived burdensomeness and thwarted belongingness were statistically explained by general mental health distress. Results indicate that mental rehearsal of painful and provocative experiences may have an impact on suicide risk.

Associations Between Types of Combat Violence and the Acquired Capability for Suicide

Research suggests that combat exposure might increase risk for suicide. The interpersonal-psychological theory of suicide (IPTS) proposes that exposure to painful and provocative experiences such as combat contribute to fearlessness about death and increased pain tolerance, which serve to enhance the individual's capability to attempt suicide. Violent and aggressive combat experiences, in particular, should demonstrate relatively stronger associations to this capability. The current study tests this proposition in a sample of deployed active duty combatants. Results indicate that all types of combat exposure independently contribute to capability for suicide. Consistent with the IPTS, when considering all types of combat simultaneously, combat characterized by violence and high levels of injury and death are associated with relatively stronger associations to this capability.

Impulsivity and suicidality: The mediating role of painful and provocative experiences

Background Multiple studies have reported a link between high levels of impulsivity and suicidal behavior. Joiner's (2005) explanation for this link is that impulsive individuals have a greater tendency to experience painful and provocative events that habituate them to fear and pain, which leads to an acquired capability for engaging in suicidal behavior. Methods Study 1 tested Joiner's (2005) hypothesis in a sample of 182 undergraduate students who completed self-report questionnaires on impulsivity, frequency of painful and provocative events, and acquired capability for suicide. In addition to self-report, pain tolerance (an aspect of acquired capability for suicide) was measured with a pressure algometer. Study 2 sought to replicate our findings from Study 1 in a sample of 516 clinical outpatients using a multi-faceted measure of impulsivity. Results Consistent with prediction, product of coefficients tests for mediation (MacKinnon et al., 2002) revealed that impulsivity has an indirect relationship with acquired capability for suicidal behavior, and that this relationship is mediated by painful and provocative events. Limitations Data from our studies are cross-sectional in nature, which does not allow for conclusions about the temporal ordering of our variables. In addition, self-report was used to measure most variables. Future research may benefit from a longitudinal design and the inclusion of other modes of assessment (e.g., behavioral measures of impulsivity). Conclusions Our findings suggest that the link between impulsivity and suicidal behavior occurs because impulsive people tend to have a greater capability for suicidal behavior, which they have acquired through experiencing painful and provocative events.

Suicidal desire and the capability for suicide: Tests of the interpersonal-psychological theory of suicidal behavior among adults.

The interpersonal-psychological theory of suicidal behavior (T. E. Joiner, 2005) proposes that an individual will not die by suicide unless he or she has both the desire to die by suicide and the ability to do so. Three studies test the theory's hypotheses. In Study 1, the interaction of thwarted belongingness and perceived burdensomeness predicted current suicidal ideation. In Study 2, greater levels of acquired capability were found among individuals with greater numbers of past attempts. Results also indicated that painful and provocative experiences significantly predicted acquired capability scores. In Study 3, the interaction of acquired capability and perceived burdensomeness predicted clinician-rated risk for suicidal behavior. Implications for the etiology, assessment, and treatment of suicidal behavior are discussed.

An Interview with Khalid Mohamed

Journalist, screenwriter, and film director, Khalid Mohamed is one of the few people who has managed to make the transition from writing about cinema to directing his own films. A long-time film critic for the Times of India and editor of Filmfare, Mohamed began his film career by writing the script for Shyam Benegal's Mammo (IN, 1995), which was loosely based on his grandaunt's life. In 1994, he wrote a moving piece about this aunt who had been deported to Pakistan from India since she was not an Indian national. Benegal asked him if he could make a film based on her story; this was the beginning of a fruitful collaboration between the two. Mohamed went on to write screenplays for Benegal's Sardari Begum (IN, 1996) and Zubeidaa (IN, 2001) also based on women from his family. His first directorial venture, Fiw, was released in 2000 (IN). The film addressed the Bombay riots of 1992-93 that were sparked off in the wake of the destruction of the Babri masjid in Ayodhya, and attempted to represent the plight of the minority Muslim community in a Hindu-Right dominated India. He followed it up with Tehzftb (IN, 2003) and more recently with Sikiilay (IN, 2005). Mohamed's films occupy an interesting intermediate space between Hindi commercial cinema and art cinema. Although he often takes on thorny socio-political issues in his scripts and in his films, he also deploys a number of mainstream conventions to communicate his more serious concerns about gender, female sexuality, and Muslim minoritarian identities. In particular, his films invite us to consider how minority religious and cultural differences may be recognized without fixing them into sites of permanent and essential antagonisms, and what sorts of political claims may be articulated from such positions. This interview was conducted in Khalid Mohamed's home in Bombay in July 2004. Priya Kumar: You have been a film critic for so long, and now you are a scriptwriter and a director. What is it that drew you to films? Khalid Mohamed: I grew up on films. One could say I was almost weaned on them. Films were a big refuge for me. I used to live with my grandparents in a big bungalow with about 40 rooms. They were quite old-she was in her mid-fifties, he was in his seventies. My grandfather was a stern figure-extra loving at times, but very harsh at other times. Their main concern was that I should concentrate on my studies. If I didn't rank first in class, there would be thunder and lightning. It was a bit stressful. Cinema became another life. It was always there. If I didn't see one film a week, I felt there was something missing. My grandmother was also a film buff. My grandfather had two theaters, National and Nishat, in one of the red light areas of Bombay. I'd go there with the servants and the neighborhood kids. I have all these crazy memories of my childhood. One of the first images I have of myself is going off to the movies in a Dodge car with my driver and servant. It was a unique experience for a kid. The theaters were all in Lamington road or Grant road. The area was called Peela House, a distortion of the word Playhouse. My driver and servant used to be very friendly with the naachnewaalis [dancing girls]. They had dates with women, the women would join them at the movies, at times there would be visits to the naachnewaali homes and I'd listen and watch, not quite sure about what was going on. I had all these provocative experiences while growing up. There were two parallel tracks going on . . . one in life and the other on the screen. It was always films throughout for me. I used to be fascinated by the technique. Right from the beginning, I have always seen films from the point of view of the camera. From those early years I was fixated-how the shots were taken and so on. I always loved the way the camera was moving. I had seen this film named Haatim Tat as a four-year-old. There was this top shot which fascinated me, and I thought you could see it that way from the balcony. …

The Promise of Cultural Institutions (review)

Reviewed by: The Promise of Cultural Institutions Patricia Galloway The Promise of Cultural Institutions. By David Carr. Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira Press, 2003. xxi, 213 pp. $24.95. ISBN 0-7591-0292-9 (paper). This, according to the foreword, is a "why to" book, a meditation on the underlying ethical commitments that should drive those whose professional homes are cultural institutions. Its author, David Carr, who teaches at the University of North Carolina, is now perhaps best known as a "museum educator." The volume is a collection of essays and presentations, only four of them previously published, taken from Carr's recent lectures and publications. The primary focus is on museums, but Carr's general principles are directed at all formal institutions that call themselves "cultural." The overriding argument is that cultural institutions can and should as their highest purpose serve as venues for projects of self-motivated informal learning—that the focus of cultural institutions should be on people first and only second on things. Read straight through, the essays are somewhat repetitive, because the same supporting themes are treated from several points of view, but each essay adds to the themes and also remains self-contained, so that the volume provides a rich source of episodic sustenance, and as a teacher of museum studies I expect to use it with profit to address these themes: 1. People should be seen as "users" of cultural institutions on their own always unfinished quests to answer the questions of a lifetime, living ideally reflective lives tending toward wholeness and away from information overload. These users of cultural institutions must be treated with the utmost consideration and respect in the vulnerability of their openness to learning and in their efforts toward critical thinking, must be "rescued" from the routinization and meaningless measurement of formal learning institutions and the banality of commercial entertainment. [End Page 347] 2. Institutions of culture should make use of "masterful" objects and texts to construct revelatory and provocative (or "incendiary") experiences for their audiences, never closing down discussion but underdetermining their interpretations, thereby helping to extend the culture that sustains them while serving as democratic forums for its discussion. 3. Language should be the heart and soul of the externalization and development of thought, and its use should be encouraged and enhanced by cultural institutions. 4. Culture professionals should see themselves as the supporters of users, providing personal assistance and tools for learning in the context of modeling and cognitive structuring activities, led by the professional as a "more capable peer" of the user. Carr, whose background is in literature, education, and museum and library services, takes his fundamental theoretical inspirations from psychologists Lev Vygotsky and Jerome Bruner and anthropologist Clifford Geertz as he draws a picture of the kind of independent cognitive activity by the motivated learner that he feels cultural institutions should support. The essays "Museums, Educative: An Encyclopedia Entry" and "The Situation that Educates" both explore in detail what informal learning inside a cultural institution should be like, providing a conspectus of the kinds of socially situated learning that museums and other cultural institutions can support. Carr also supplies an excellent annotated bibliography, modeling in his own practice the same kind of assistance for the reader as he suggests should always be offered to users of cultural institutions. In addition, there is a particularly helpful appendix that provides a guide to observation of the features of a cultural institution as experienced by a user. Oddly, although Habermasian communicative action appears to be a central figure in the book, Habermas and the whole frame of Enlightenment rationality and Western liberal democracy remains the taken-for-granted context. And although Carr's ideal cultural institutions would be emphatically user-centered while secondarily carrying out their additional function as machines for cultural reproduction through preservation of cultural materials, the user of cultural institutions (even though most of the essays focus on the adult user) is always to be the less capable peer to the culture professional, is rarely to be more than consulted about what the cultural institution should offer, and then only at the pleasure of the professional (although in perhaps the strongest essay, "Museums and Public...

Too Many Intrusions on Instructional Time

When school days are fragmented and move at the pace of fast-food eateries rather than four-star restaurants, teachers have no time in which to build the provocative experiences that nurture richly layered learning - experiences that provide teachers with the continuing intellectual and creative challenges that allow them to be professional educators rather than short-order cooks. IT WAS 21 June 1999, the last day of the school year and my last day as a classroom teacher. After a decade of bulletin boards, lunch counts, and parent conferences and of teaching every grade from second through fifth, I had decided it was time to move on. What precipitated the voluntary end of my career as a classroom teacher? It wasn't burnout, and my salary was adequate. I had long ago adjusted to 50-hour weeks and Sunday afternoons communing with homework papers. I had moved beyond problems with student behavior, and my final years were manageable and even calm. I never stopped appreciating my personal interactions with students or the supportive involvement of their parents. So much seemed to be ideal, but the keystone that held it all together had finally come loose: I had lost my passion for teaching. I became a teacher not just to be with children but to teach them. In my last two years in the classroom, however, I no longer felt that I was teaching as well as I could. I had fallen into the trap of maintenance teaching, teaching effectively enough but not making the extra effort to teach better. The factors pushing teachers to such a low point are, of course, complex. Indeed, they have been a major focus of research for at least two decades. But an often overlooked factor, hiding in plain sight, is the problem of how instructional time is organized in the average day and week. A cursory glance through my planning book would show most days broken into shards of time, with running marginal notes stating when certain students would be coming and going for various pull-out classes and programs. Consequently, the curriculum often had to be chopped into segments and compressed. I felt powerless to change the situation and faced a difficult choice: learn to teach within the constraints or find something else to do. I chose the latter. New Expectations, Same Old Schedule Such fretting would have been out of place not too many years ago, when elementary teachers routinely divided the instructional day into separate subject areas, with each subject further divided into self- contained lessons. Instruction tended to be a continuous replay of structured activities: provide examples of adjectives, then distribute worksheets for practice; introduce the formula for finding the area of a triangle, then assign pages in the textbook; read about the early explorers, then answer the questions at the end of the chapter. Fortunately, much has changed. Expectations for student learning are higher and now require challenging problem-solving situations, in-depth discussions, and extended projects for small groups and individuals. As teachers have gradually adopted such new approaches as writing workshops, literature circles, integrated curricula, problem-solving math, and exploratory science, they have needed flexibility in the use of every minute of the school day. But classroom teachers are less and less in control of their students' time, and I haven't even mentioned special periods such as those assigned to art, physical education, library, music, or drug and HIV-AIDS education. It is difficult to believe that any school district could be unaware of how time undergirds effective instruction. Yet, ironically, in responding to the pressure of standards and high-stakes assessments, additional directives from the central office to schools and teachers are proliferating, often intruding on instructional time and undermining teaching and learning. Such hastily adopted additions to the curriculum can force teachers to make triage decisions about the use of time that lead to fragmented and erratic instruction. …

ABA-ZAK: A world view exercise

People often take their own language for granted, unaware that their native tongue is not merely a “neutral” communication system, but a pervasive medium that directly influences every aspect of their lives. This is probably because we develop our language ability so very early in life that we seldom reflect on it. For this reason, contact with diversity — and especially linguistic diversity — can be a richly provocative experience. Grappling with communication through a foreign language provides an opportunity to learn about another way of life; even more important, it raises questions about one's own language, culture, and world view. Although individuals from minority languages and cultures are commonly challenged to do just this, other individuals, by virtue of belonging to the mainstream of society, may not also have had the benefit of such an experience, which can lead to cross-cultural awareness and an expanded world view. This exercise helps to create such an opportunity.

Listener Response Strategies to a Distressed Other

Talking with someone who is distressed can be an emotionally provocative experience. When confronted with a distressed person, listeners have been found to employ a variety of response strategies, with varying effects on the troubled talker; and to experience, themselves, a range of feeling reactions. This study examined the association between a listener's response style and her affective reactions following a conversation with a distressed individual. Thirtyfemale subjects participated in a fifteen-minute dyadic interaction in which they talked with a confederate enacting a depressed role. Observational coding of listener response strategies revealed that subjects who relied on advice-giving, chit-chat and/or joking were significantly more depressed and more rejecting of their partners than were subjects who acknowledged the confederate's mood and who relied on supportive listening techniques. These findings suggest the importance of listener's behaviour in determining the outcomes of informal helping encounters.

Dysfunctional Transactions and Therapeutic Functions: An Evolutive Model

The present study is a result of an interdisciplinary team's work, where a physicist, a family therapist and a developmental psychologist try to share their knowledge and epistemologies. In this kind of conflictual companionship, models of one discipline are tentatively applied to another. This doesn't imply that the different disciplines are isomorphic, but it provides for unusual frames of reference: questions, possibly essential ones, are reformulated in a new language, or in a perspective which was not accessible within the conceptual framework developed for one particular discipline. Our experience is that this kind of effort, in itself a provocative learning experience, is also conducive to original tentative answers in all disciplines involved. Be they of theoretical or experimental nature, it is then up to the specialists of these disciplines to validate the evolved propositions in terms of their own categories.