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Revealing semantic and emotional structure of suicide notes with cognitive network science.

ABSTRACT: Understanding how people who commit suicide perceive their cognitive states and emotions represents an important open scientific challenge. We build upon cognitive network science, psycholinguistics and semantic frame theory to introduce a network representation of suicidal ideation as expressed in multiple suicide notes. By reconstructing the knowledge structure of such notes, we reveal interconnections between the ideas and emotional states of people who committed suicide through an analysis of emotional balance motivated by structural balance theory, semantic prominence and emotional profiling. Our results indicate that connections between positively- and negatively-valenced terms give rise to a degree of balance that is significantly higher than in a null model where the affective structure is randomized and in a linguistic baseline model capturing mind-wandering in absence of suicidal ideation. We show that suicide notes are affectively compartmentalized such that positive concepts tend to cluster together and dominate the overall network structure. Notably, this positive clustering diverges from perceptions of self, which are found to be dominated by negative, sad conceptual associations in analyses based on subject-verb-object relationships and emotional profiling. A key positive concept is "love", which integrates information relating the self to others and is semantically prominent across suicide notes. The emotions constituting the semantic frame of "love" combine joy and trust with anticipation and sadness, which can be linked to psychological theories of meaning-making as well as narrative psychology. Our results open new ways for understanding the structure of genuine suicide notes and may be used to inform future research on suicide prevention.

SUBMITTER: Teixeira AS

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8484592 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:BackgroundStrengthening social integration could prevent suicidal behavior. However, minimal research has examined social integration through relationship network structure. To address this important gap, we tested whether structural characteristics of school networks predict school rates of ideation and attempts.MethodsIn 38 US high schools, 10,291 students nominated close friends and trusted adults to construct social networks. We used mixed-effects logistic regression models to test individual student networks and likelihood of suicidal ideation (SI) and suicide attempts (SA); and linear regression models to estimate associations between school network characteristics and school rates of SI, SA, and SA among all with ideation.ResultsLower peer network integration and cohesion increased likelihood of SI and SA across individual and school-level models. Two factors increased SA: student isolation from adults and suicidal students' popularity and clustering. A multivariable model identified higher SA in schools where youth-adult relationships were concentrated in fewer students (B = 4.95 [1.46, 8.44]) and suicidal students had higher relative popularity versus nonsuicidal peers (B = 0.93 [0.10, 1.77]). Schools had lower SA rates when more students named the same trusted adults named by friends and many students named the same trusted adults. When adjusting for depression, violence victimization and bullying, estimates for adult network characteristics were substantially unchanged whereas some peer effects decreased.ConclusionsSchoolwide peer and youth-adult relationship patterns influence SA rates beyond individual student connections. Network characteristics associated with suicide attempts map onto three theory-informed domains: social integration versus thwarted relational needs, group cohesion, and suicidal students' social influence. Network interventions addressing these processes, such as maximizing youth-adult connections schoolwide and heightening influence of youth with healthy coping, could create more protective schools. Longitudinal and intervention studies are needed to determine how schools differentiate in network structure and clarify reciprocal dynamics between network characteristics and suicidal behavior.

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Revealing semantic and emotional structure of suicide notes with cognitive network science.

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