title: The mirror effect: self-awareness alone increases suicide thought accessibility.
abstract: According to objective self-awareness theory, when individuals are in a state of self-awareness, they tend to compare themselves to their standards. Self-to-standard comparison often yields unfavorable results and can be assimilated to a failure, activating an escape motivation. Building on recent research on the link between failure and suicide thought accessibility, the present experiment tested the hypothesis that mirror exposure alone provokes an increase in suicide thought accessibility. Participants were exposed to their mirror reflection (or not) while completing a lexical decision task with suicide-related words. Self-to-standard discrepancy salience was manipulated by asking participants to list actual and ideal traits before versus after the lexical decision task. As predicted, mirror-exposed participants recognized suicide-related words quicker than those unexposed to their mirror image. Self-to-standard discrepancy salience did not moderate this effect. Discussion focuses on the role of the motivation to escape self-awareness in the availability of suicide-related ideas.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Center for Research on Cognition and Learning (CeRCA), UMR 7295, University of Poitiers and National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), France. Electronic address: leila.selimbegovic@univ-poitiers.fr.
authors.forename: Leila
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Selimbegović
authors.forename: Armand
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Chatard
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011897:Random Allocation; D012649:Self Concept; D012647:Self-Assessment; D013405:Suicide / Q000523:psychology*; D013850:Thinking; D014796:Visual Perception; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Cognitive accessibility; Escape theory; Mirror exposure; Self-awareness; Suicide