Two recent investigations have sssessed the role of altered affective states in relation to suicide. Spiegel and Neuringer(6) found that suicide note writers who subsequently committed suicide were far less explicit about their suicidal intentions than those who faked suicide notes. It appeared that the truly suicidal individual might be avoiding direct psychological confrontation of the self-destructive course of action in which he was about to engage. Keith-Spiegel and Spiegel('1 compared nursing notes written within 24 hours prior to suicide with nursing notes of randomly selected control patients of the same age and diagnosis and found that more dysphoric psychological states were recorded for controls than for suicides. Perhaps a blocking of dysphoric affective states may tend to precede suicide and help make it possible to carry out a self-destructive act.
This study assessed the relationship between psychological and autonomic response variables in Ss who have different histories with respect to suicide. An attempt was made to answer the following questions: (a) Will groups of suicide attempters, threateners, and controls differ in galvanic skin response to various kinds of stimuli, including concepts which are "emotionally loaded" and "neutral"? (b) Is there a relationship between strength of ambivalence toward suicide and magnitude of galvanic skin response to the concept "suicide"? ( c ) Will groups of attempters, threateners and controls differ in how strongly they feel about the concept suicide? (d) Will intensity of expressed feeling about suicide be reflected in magnitude of GSRs to the concept suicide?