Influence of Emotions on Executive Functions in Suicide Attempters

Suicide has been associated with diverse risk factors, including alterations in executive functions and emotional processing. The aim of the present work was to evaluate the performance on executive functioning tasks with emotional content of suicide attempters. 75 subjects participated in the study, divided into 3 groups of 25 individuals each: a) suicide attempters with depressive symptoms; b) participants with depressive symptoms but no attempted suicide; and, c) non-depressed participants. Scales that evaluate depression, anxiety, impulsivity and the risk of suicide were applied, as were the original and emotional Stroop Tests, the Wisconsin Card-sorting task in its original and emotional versions, an Iowa-type gambling task, and the Behavioral Rating Inventory of Executive Functions (BRIEF-A). The suicide attempters scored higher than the other two groups on the depression and motor impulsivity scales and on the category of change in the BRIEF-A. This group also had longer response times under conditions of interference and a higher number of reading errors on the original Stroop Test, compared to the non-depressed participants. Also, on the Iowa-type gambling task, those patients showed no improvement in their performance when the first and last blocks of trials were compared, in contrast to the results from the other two groups. No other differences were observed between the group of suicide attempters and the other two groups in their performance on the executive tasks. These results suggest that patients with suicidal tendencies present problems in inhibitory control in social contexts, together with subtle alterations in their executive functions.