Individuals with higher suicide risk showed more anger and disgust during rest

Abstract

Previous research showed that suicide risk was associated with the anger trait and the facial expression of anger when advising on life dilemmas. We investigated if suicide risk was associated with the facial expression of anger during rest, a state when individuals often reflect upon their lives. Participants took a 1-min rest before being assessed for suicide risk. We measured 147 participants’ frontal-view facial expressions during their rest 1475–3694 times using automated facial expression analysis technology. Participants’ suicide risk was significantly positively correlated with their anger and disgust during the rest, which may be related to psychological pain and death-related thoughts among individuals with suicide risk. Therefore, rest for clinical patients should not be seen simply as a “rest” for the mind. Rather, for counselors, rest may open a window to look into patients’ inner thoughts that may be important to their lives.

Acknowledgments

We thank Ms. Mengyuan Liu, who kindly provided help in preparing the files for manuscript submission.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

All the original data and analysis scripts are available at the Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/7548h/files/?view_only=247c14566fb642369be82b79277c0ebe.

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China: “A New Paradigm of Wisdom Measurement: Second Person Wise Advising” (grant number: 31800905).