(PS9-73) The Negative Self-Focus Task: A Novel Behavioral Measure of Negative Urgency

Impulsivity is a multi-dimensional construct that refers to behaviors without forethought or conscious judgment. It has been shown to be a risk factor in personality disorders, alcohol use disorder, suicide, and nonsuicidal self-injury. Negative urgency, a proposed feature of impulsivity, is the tendency to act rashly when experiencing negative emotions and may be a distinguishing feature between those who attempt suicide and those who do not. However, measures of negative urgency are limited by self-report biases and fail to predict real-life impulsive behavior. In this study, we aim to address these limitations by analyzing data from the pilot test of a novel, behavioral measure of negative urgency called the Negative Self-Focus Task (NSF). We use online advertisements to recruit adults to complete a series online surveys, including the NSF. We plan to complete data collection by early May and will have collected data from, at minimum, 60 study participants. We will examine the NSF’s convergent validity with existing measure of negative urgency and daily-life impulsive behaviors, as well as its divergent validity from measures of similar but distinct constructs (e.g., distress tolerance). Results presented in this abstract will highlight the psychometric properties of a novel, urgently-needed, behavioral measure of negative urgency. We will discuss the importance of behavioral measurements of negative urgency and implications for future work seeking to study impulsive behavior.