Date of Award
2016
Rights
Access is available to all users
Document Type
Thesis
Department
Psychology
Abstract
"To be able to help those contemplating suicide, the first step is to understand why people die by suicide. The cognitive theory of depression and the affective theory of psychache answer that question differently. Specifically, although they may have different parts in their theoretical systems, many of those parts overlap conceptually. The purpose of this study was to find if the two theories could be combined to create a more holistic theory between them. The application of each theory's aspects, in the form of standardized scales administered online to 427 college students, accounts for the nearly the same amount of change in suicidal ideation. Scales, each measuring one aspect of a theory, were compared as a whole to see if the account for the same or different variance in suicidal ideation. The two theories primarily overlapped accounting for 41% of the variance in suicide ideation with 31% of variance overlapping. Because each theory adds a small amount of new understanding to how suicide manifests, discussion and a possible new direction for future research focusing on the benefits of creating a unified theory of suicide is provided"--Leaf iv.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
DeBroeck, Leo D., "Exploring the conceptual overlap of the cognitive and affective theories of suicide" (2016). EWU Masters Thesis Collection. 352.
https://dc.ewu.edu/theses/352
