UROP Research Mentor Project Submission Portal: Submission #675

Overall Research Project Description Self-triggering is a relatively new construct as a focal point of empirical investigation, beginning with Bellet et al. (2020). Thus far, it has been studied in the context of posttraumatic stress disorder (Bellet et al., 2020; McGhie et al., 2023; Musicaro et al., 2023), despite its emergence in other disorders such as nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) disorder (Brown et al., 2020) and its similar functions to direct self-harming behaviors (Bellet et al., 2020). The only existing assessment of self-triggering, the Self-Triggering Questionnaire (STQ; Bellet et al., 2020), ties the behavior to a traumatic event, which is not applicable to all individuals who engage in said behavior, and likens it to nonsuicidal self-injury, despite there being no involvement of physical harm to the body. This multiphasic study aims, first, to clarify the nature of self-triggering when instead framed as a safety behavior not unique to posttraumatic stress, and second, to incorporate the qualitative qualities gleaned into the existing Self-Triggering Questionnaire (Bellet et al., 2020).