Risk for Suicide Among Treatment Seeking Adolescents: The Role of Positive and Negative Affect Intensity

Risk for suicide among adolescents remains a serious public health concern. Despite the relevance of individual differences in affective experience to clinically relevant problems generally, and risk for suicide more specifically, relatively little work has evaluated affect intensity in relation to adolescent risk for suicide. To address this notable gap in the literature, the current study evaluated the unique associations between dimensions of affect intensity and risk for suicide in a sample of 165 treatment-seeking adolescents ages 13–17 years. As predicted, low positive affectivity and high negative affect intensity accounted for unique variance in adolescent suicide risk. Findings are discussed in terms of the theoretical and applied implications of both positive and negative affect intensity in the context of adolescent risk for suicide.