Abstract
The Death/Suicide Implicit Association Test (IAT) is effective at detecting and prospectively predicting suicidal thoughts and behaviors. However, traditional IAT scoring procedures used in all prior studies (i.e., D‐scores) provide an aggregate score that is inherently relative, obfuscating the separate associations (i.e., “Me = Death/Suicide,” “Me = Life”) that might be most relevant for understanding suicide‐related implicit cognition. Here, we decompose the D‐ scores and validate a new analytic technique called the Decomposed D‐scores (“DD‐scores”) that creates separate scores for each category (“Me,” “Not Me”) in the IAT. Across large online volunteer samples (N > 12,000), results consistently showed that a weakened association between “Me = Life” is more strongly predictive of having a history of suicidal attempts than is a stronger association between “Me = Death/Suicide.” These findings replicated across three different versions of the IAT and were observed when calculated using both reaction times and error rates. However, among those who previously attempted suicide, a strengthened association between “Me = Death” is more strongly predictive of the recency of a suicide attempt. These results suggest that decomposing traditional IAT D‐scores can offer new insights into the mental associations that may underlie clinical phenomena and may help to improve the prediction, and ultimately the prevention, of these clinical outcomes.