Suicide causes significant trauma to families and has become an important social public health and mental health issue [1]. According to the 2021 China Health Statistics Yearbook, suicide has become the third leading cause of accidental injury death in the age group of 10 to 20 years old in China [2]. Generally, there are usually three stages in an individual’s suicide-related behaviors process: generating suicidal ideation, formulating a suicidal plan, and carrying out the suicidal behavior [3]. Among them, suicidal ideation refers to the contents of death, suicide and serious self-harm in an individual’s thoughts or ideas, including the plans, steps, and results of suicidal ideation [4]. Also, suicidal ideation refers to the early psychological activity of suicidal behavior [5], and it is a prerequisite for a suicide action [6]. Although having suicidal ideation does not necessarily mean an individual will really act on it, it is a strong predictor before committing suicide.
Adolescents are in a critical period characterized by rapid physical and psychological changes and development [7]. During adolescence, youth undergo a qualitative transition phase from immaturity to maturity [8], although adolescents’ independent consciousness has been significantly enhanced, their psychological tolerance in the face of difficulties and setbacks remains vulnerable [9], and they are more prone to be filled with contradictions and agitation than adults [10]. Therefore, it appears essential to draw attention to their mental health problems. In a sense, rapid but unbalanced physiological and psychological changes may make them feel confused and stressed [7], also they show unique psychological characteristics in their process of growing up [11]. For example, adolescents are easily affected by adverse factors, resulting in suicidal thoughts, which may lead to the occurrence of suicide behaviors [12]. Therefore, it is important to identify adolescents’ suicidal ideation in time.
Previous studies have shown that suicidal ideation is associated with adolescents’ personality characteristics [13], parental rearing pattern [14], and family environment [1]. Meanwhile, depression, despair, and other negative emotions [13, 15], substance abuse [16], stressors in life and irrational beliefs [17] are also risk factors for suicidal ideation. However, even in the face of adversity or stressful life events, many adolescents can still adapt well to the environment, and will not easily choose to commit suicide. Because they have positive psychological factors, which can buffer against the risk of suicide in the face of stress [18]. Furthermore, protective factors can reduce the possibility of negative outcomes for individuals [19]. A high level of protective factors can buffer individuals from the impact of adverse outcomes, while a low level of protective factors can possibly place individuals at risk of suicide [20]. Numerous studies have confirmed psychological resilience is a positive psychological protection resource [14, 21, 22], and it is a protective factor to reduce the occurrence of suicidal ideation [23]. Psychological resilience refers to the process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences, especially through mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility and adjustment to external and internal demands [24]. Some scholars have found that improving adolescents’ psychological resilience can help buffer them from depression, improve their mental health [25], and reduce the risk of suicidal ideation [1]. Resilience can help an individual to overcome setbacks and return to the original well-adjusted state [26]. Relevant studies have also shown that psychological resilience can protect individuals from the impact of perceived pressure and promote individuals to have a good ability to adapt to their environment [27, 28].
At the same time, adolescence is also a period characterized by rapid changes in the brain, during which excitatory synapses are reduced [29], and the myelin sheaths in the frontal, parietal, and temporal regions increase [30], which may be associated with the occurrence of high-risk for suicidal behaviors [31]. Several lines of evidence have indicated that high school students with suicidal ideation showed different cognitive characteristics compared to those without suicidal ideation. Specifically, these students had more negative self-schema [32], attentional bias [33], and semantic processing bias towards negative emotional information [4]. They also tended to make more negative attributions [34] and preferred taking more risks in risky decisions [35]. Meanwhile, as an important component of high-level executive functions, some researchers have pointed out that problem-solving ability is another significant protective factor for suicidal ideation [36, 37, 38]. The researchers found in addition to the differences in attention and cognitive style, that the high school students who exhibited suicidal ideation also show lower quality of problem-solving strategies [39]. In some ways, the comprehensive assessment of problem-solving ability includes the measurement of individual planning, inhibition and working memory, reflecting whether one person has difficulties in planning, concept formation, decision making, and cognitive flexibility and so on [40, 41]. Therefore, using an experimental task that measures problem-solving ability can further evaluate the differences in advanced cognition function between students with and without suicidal ideation, which will be conducive to the early identification of psychological characteristics [37].
Additionally, previous studies mostly focused on high school students, and did not explore the difference of psychological resilience and the cognitive characteristics of adolescents with suicidal ideation in a younger age group. Students in grade one of junior middle school (aged 10 to 14) are in early adolescence with rapid growth changes, physically and psychologically. The pressure they face in academic and interpersonal aspects can easily bring them to a state of agitation that is often maladaptive [7], and even suicide or other extreme harming behaviors [22]. Therefore, it is important to explore their suicidal ideation, psychological and cognitive characteristics. Here, we firstly distributed the Self-rating Idea of Suicide Scale (SIOSS) [42] to the students in grade one of junior middle school. According to the score of SIOSS, the students were divided into two groups: the Suicidal Ideation (SI) group and Non-Suicidal Ideation (NSI) group. Then, we used the Psychological Resilience Scale (PRS) [43], and the Tower of Hanoi task (TOH), which is a classical paradigm to measure problem solving ability [44, 45], to compare their differences in psychological and cognitive characteristics. We hypothesized that the total score of PRS and the total score of SIOSS showed significant negative correlation. Meanwhile, compared with the NSI group students, SI group students had weaker psychological resilience, and they performed worse on TOH.