تعامل دردناک در خودآسیبی عمدی: نقش تعیین هدف مشروط

Abstract Conditional goal setting is the tendency for people to see attainment of their future personal goals as necessary for their well-being. It has been argued that this represents an unhealthy way of relating to one’s goals, as well as being particularly problematic when goals are perceived as unlikely. High conditional goal setting has been found to be related to depression and to hopelessness. The present study examined conditional goal setting in deliberate self-harm, where problematic thinking about the future is very prominent. A group of individuals attending hospital for a recent episode of deliberate self-harm (N = 25) were compared with controls attending hospital for minor injuries (N = 25) as well as a psychologically disordered but non-suicidal control group (N = 25). Participants generated goals and rated goal likelihood, the extent to which those goals were seen as necessary for their future well-being (conditional goal setting), and also the extent to which the goals were seen as sufficient for their future well-being (goal sufficiency). Deliberate self-harm patients showed a higher degree of both conditional goal setting and goal sufficiency than did both of the other groups, further confirming the idea of painful engagement with personal goals, rather than disengagement, as characterising deliberate self-harm.

Results Demographic variables Table 1 shows the demographic details of the groups. Some measured categories have been collapsed in order to avoid very small cell sizes (most notably ethnicity, but also education, relationship status, and employment status). The three groups did not differ on age (F(2,72) = 1.26, n.s.), gender (χ2(2) = 2.12, n.s.) and marital status (χ2(2) = 6.20, n.s.), but did differ on ethnicity (χ2(2) = 7.00, p < .05), education (χ2(2) = 7.53, p < .05) and employment (χ2(2) = 9.79, p < .01). The demographics of the self-harming group supported previous research on deliberate self-harm, with this group having a majority of white ethnicity participants with low levels of education and high rates of unemployment. Because of the potential confounding effect of these variables they were controlled for in subsequent analyses. Where individual post-hoc comparisons were conducted these also controlled for the three demographic variables.