Emotional Urgency, Pain Avoidance, and Behavioral Risk-Taking in the Suicidal Continuum: An Exploratory Study of Balloon Analog Risk Task Performance

This research investigates the relationships between emotional urgency traits, pain avoidance strategies, and behavioral risk-taking patterns across the suicidal continuum in a general population sample (N=350). Using the Balloon Analog Risk Task (BART) as an objective behavioral measure combined with validated self-report instruments, this study examines an integrative model linking dispositional impulsivity, emotion regulation processes, and decisional behaviors across suicidal phenomena. Primary Aim : Are the behavioral patterns captured by the BART linked to suicide risk? Does BART performance vary according to suicide risk? Can these variations be explained by psychological factors and mechanisms, such as negative urgency, or avoidance of psychological pain? Rather than testing directional confirmatoryory hypotheses (which require robust empirical literature), this study adopts an exploratory approach acknowledging that the BART-suicide field contains only 3 published studies with partially convergent but insufficiently robust effect sizes and directions to justify confirmatory pre-specification.