Objective
Suicide risk is a powerful predictor to evaluate the probability of suicide. It includes past, present, and future suicidal ideation, suicide attempts, and even death by suicide (Nock, 2010). The suicide risk of college students is 2 to 4 times higher than that of other age groups (Jiang et al., 2018). Terror management theory (TMT) emphasizes that anxiety and fear of death may trigger a higher risk of suicide in individuals (Juhl & Routledge, 2016). This is contrary to the view of the interpersonal theory of suicide (IPTS). Anxiety is a negative emotion that directed towards the future. This suggests that death anxiety may involve two potential factors that affect individual's suicide risk. Under death anxiety, the individual becomes uncertain about the future, and this thought of death can lead to unpleasant emotions. Therefore, this study aims to explore the internal mechanisms of the relationship between death anxiety and the suicide risk of college students from both the perception of the future and emotional regulation perspectives.
Methods
In this study, a cluster sampling method was used to select undergraduate students from a certain university as participants. A total of 1234 college students (996 females, 18.77 ± 0.81 years) completed the Temper Death Anxiety Scale, the Future Time Perspective Scale, the Regulatory Emotional Self-efficacy Scale, and the Beck Scale for Suicide Ideation-Chinese Version. The SPSS PROCESS macro (Model 6) developed by Hayes was used to conducted chain mediation analysis (Hayes, 2018).
Results & Discussion
(1) Death anxiety was significantly positively correlated with suicide risk and significantly negatively correlated with future time perception and regulatory emotional self-efficacy; (2) Future time perception and regulatory emotional self-efficacy played independent mediating roles in the relationship between death anxiety and suicide risk; (3) A chain mediated role for future time perception and regulatory emotional self-efficacy in death anxiety and suicide risk. First, driven by the basic psychological need of a sense of control, individuals with higher death anxiety are more likely to choose to take control of their lives by suicide. This may be a natural, universal human behavior. Then, future time perspective; regulatory emotional self-efficacy may reduce the suicide risk in individuals with death anxiety.
Conclusions
Our results support the idea that death anxiety is an important risk factor for suicidal risk. Increasing college students’ expectations for the future and self-efficacy in regulating their emotions may help reduce suicide risk when they are anxious about death.
Acknowledgement: This research was supported by the Zhejiang Educational Science Planning Project (No.2024SCG358), Zhejiang Province Philosophy and Social Science Planning Project (No.24NDQN22Z).
References:
Nock, M. K. (2010). Self-injury. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 6, 339–363. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.clinpsy.121208.131258
Jiang, H., Niu, L., Hahne, J., Hu, M., Fang, J., Shen, M., & Xiao, S. (2018). Changing of suicide rates in China, 2002–2015. Journal of Affective Disorders, 240, 165–170. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2018.07.043
 

death anxiety; suicide risk; future time perspective; regulatory emotional self-efficacy; college students