Expectation violation reduces the accessibility of implicit suicidal concepts and explicit life concepts

Liu Bo¹WU Yuntena^1,2*Jin Tong Lin^1,2Lei Ze Yu¹

• ¹College of Psychology, Inner Mongolia Normal University, Hohhot, China
• ²Mental Health Education Research and Service Center, Key Research Base of Humanities and Social Science in Inner Mongolia Colleges and Universities, Hohhot, China

Terror Management Theory posits that threats to cultural worldviews increase death concept accessibility. Suicide and death concepts are related and jointly represent the fear of life. Threats to cultural worldviews may similarly increase suicide concept accessibility. Current study situates threats to cultural worldviews within a broad context of expectation violation, with four experiments examining its impact on both implicit and explicit suicide concept accessibility. Expectancy violation was induced by violating the stated purpose of an intelligence test, challenging established beliefs about evolution, and presenting logically incoherent sentences. Implicit concept accessibility was assessed using a lexical decision task requiring discrimination between words and non-words, while explicit concept accessibility was measured through a semantic categorization task involving direct judgments of word meaning. The results showed that, compared to expectation confirmation, expectation violation reduced implicit suicide concept accessibility (Experiments 1 and 2) and explicit life concept accessibility (Experiments 3 and 4). The impact of expectation violation on suicide concept accessibility may reflect the underlying cognitive framework of increased suicide risk.