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RETRACTED ARTICLE: Machine learning of neural representations of suicide and emotion concepts identifies suicidal youth

Nature Human Behaviour volume 1, pages 911–919 (2017)Cite this article

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This article was retracted on 06 April 2023

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Abstract

The clinical assessment of suicidal risk would be substantially complemented by a biologically based measure that assesses alterations in the neural representations of concepts related to death and life in people who engage in suicidal ideation. This study used machine-learning algorithms (Gaussian Naive Bayes) to identify such individuals (17 suicidal ideators versus 17 controls) with high (91%) accuracy, based on their altered functional magnetic resonance imaging neural signatures of death-related and life-related concepts. The most discriminating concepts were ‘death’, ‘cruelty’, ‘trouble’, ‘carefree’, ‘good’ and ‘praise’. A similar classification accurately (94%) discriminated nine suicidal ideators who had made a suicide attempt from eight who had not. Moreover, a major facet of the concept alterations was the evoked emotion, whose neural signature served as an alternative basis for accurate (85%) group classification. This study establishes a biological, neurocognitive basis for altered concept representations in participants with suicidal ideation, which enables highly accurate group membership classification.

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Fig. 1: Clusters of stable voxels of the suicidal ideator group and the control group.
Fig. 2
Fig. 3: Group separation in the multidimensional scaling of the activation features of the participants used by the classifier.
Fig. 4: Group separation in the multidimensional scaling of the activation features of the nine ideators who have attempted suicide and the eight ideators without attempts used by the classifier.

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Acknowledgements

This research was partially supported by the National Institute of Mental Health Grant MH029617 and an Endowed Chair in Suicide Studies at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Marcel Adam Just & Vladimir L. Cherkassky

  2. Department of Psychiatry, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Lisa Pan & David Brent

  3. Department of Psychology, Florida International University, Miami, FL, USA

    Dana L. McMakin

  4. Clinical Psychology Department, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

    Christine Cha

  5. Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Matthew K. Nock

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Contributions

The experiments were conceived and designed by M.A.J., L.P., V.L.C., D.L.M. and D.B. The experiments were performed by M.A.J., L.P. and D.B. The materials and analysis tools were contributed by M.A.J., V.L.C., C.C. and M.K.N. The data were analysed by V.L.C. The paper was written by M.A.J., V.L.C. and D.B.

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Correspondence to Marcel Adam Just.

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This article has been retracted. Please see the retraction notice for more detail: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01581-1

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Just, M., Pan, L., Cherkassky, V.L. et al. RETRACTED ARTICLE: Machine learning of neural representations of suicide and emotion concepts identifies suicidal youth. Nat Hum Behav 1, 911–919 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-017-0234-y

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