Fig. 1

Example of how suicidality could be explained from a psychological primitive perspective. Suicidality emerges from three psychological primitives – conceptual knowledge, interoception (i.e., core affect), and exteroception (i.e., external situation). That is, suicidality occurs when someone makes sense of their ongoing internal and external stimuli as suicidality based on their conceptual knowledge about suicidality. For suicidality to emerge, the suicidality concept must be activated. Technically, core affect and external situations could take any form during activation of the suicidality concept. In practice, however, regularities in these two other primitives emerge due to regularities in the suicidality concept and external situations. Psychological primitives mediate the association between biopsychosocial factors and suicidality. This approach accounts for both heterogeneity in biopsychosocial contributions to suicidality (i.e., complex/indeterminate biopsychosocial contributions to suicidality) and heterogeneity in suicidality itself (i.e., indeterminate features of suicidality, variation in suicidality across cultures). This approach suggests that research should focus on understanding how suicidality concepts are formed, altered, disrupted, activated, and implemented