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Beskrivelse
People who engage in non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) report doing so largely to
manage overwhelming emotions. Prominent theories of NSSI argue that an amplified
emotional response system creates the context in which a person chooses to regulate their
emotions by engaging in NSSI. In line with these theories, people who engage in NSSI
consistently report greater global emotion reactivity and emotion dysregulation than do
controls. These global self-reports of emotional functioning also predict the onset and
cessation of NSSI, demonstrating their considerable utility in understanding the behaviour.
However, global self-reports provide an overall evaluation of one's average affective
experience and so are ill-suited to isolating precise alterations in emotional responding.
I first establish how best to assess NSSI (Study 1a and 1b). I then leverage
experimental affective science and individual differences methodologies to test whether NSSI
is characterised by a more reactive and intense emotional response to challenge, and/or
whether factors that help to create, modify, and later recall the emotional response are altered
in those who engage in NSSI compared with controls. Study 2 compared how young adults
with a past-year history of NSSI and controls subjectively and physiologically reacted to, and
recovered from, acute stress. Study 3 compared how young adults with a past-year history of
NSSI and controls subjectively reacted to both explicit and more ambiguous social exclusion.
