FROM AGGRESSION TO AUTO-AGGRESSION: PSYCHOLOGICAL PREDICTORS OF SUICIDAL RISK IN PSYCHOLOGY STUDENTS

Abstract

In contemporary conditions of chronic social stress, particularly within the context of war, suicidal risk among university students acquires new psychological configurations. Students of psychology represent a particularly vulnerable group, as heightened reflexivity, continuous emotional engagement with psychological distress, and limited self-regulatory resources may facilitate the formation of latent maladaptive mechanisms. Recent international research increasingly emphasizes the role of aggression-related traits as hidden predictors of auto-aggressive and suicidal tendencies; however, these mechanisms remain insufficiently explored within the Ukrainian psychological context. The aim of this study was to identify latent components of aggressiveness in the psycho-emotional functioning of psychology students and to determine their role in the formation of suicidal risk, considering their interaction with emotional regulation, anxiety, depression, and reflective characteristics of personality. This study is among the first in the Ukrainian empirical context to conceptualize suicidal risk through the lens of latent aggressiveness, particularly hostility and negativism, as central psychological predictors of auto-aggressive dynamics in student youth. The findings demonstrate that classical internalizing variables such as anxiety and depression do not possess independent predictive value in the studied sample. In contrast, the aggression-hostility cluster accounts for more than half of the variance in suicidal risk. Additionally, irritability was identified as a partial affective mediator linking negativistic attitudes to suicidal tendencies, indicating a latent emotional pathway of risk formation. The results indicate that suicidal risk among psychology students is primarily shaped by the accumulation of internal tension associated with hostility and negativism rather than by overt depressive or anxious symptomatology. These findings support the need to shift preventive and psychotherapeutic strategies from an exclusive focus on affective symptoms toward addressing aggression-related defensive patterns, emotional reactivity, and interpersonal interpretative biases. The study fills an important gap in Ukrainian psychological research and outlines perspectives for further investigation of the latent mechanisms of suicidal risk under conditions of prolonged stress.