Self injury is the act of deliberately hurting the own self physically, without intention to suicide. Self-injury was found as a maladaptive behavior that has a high prevalence of occurrence in college students. The previous study found that prevalence of self injury behaviour in college students population was 14% to 35%. In general, college students are experiencing transition phase from adolescence to adulthood, called by emerging adulthood period. This period was not easy because some of challenges should be faced, especially related to academic and social demand. Stressful life events from academic and social life’s demands are possible to bring various negative emotion symptoms, such as depression, anxiety, and stress, in college students. Furthermore, failure to achieve the demands or negative feedback are possible to provoke self criticism to themselves. Inability to handle the emergence of negative emotion and high self criticism leads one’s to develop the urge to self injury. Some studies found significant correlation between these variables and self injury, but have not explained the impact of these variables to self injury. According to these studies, it is important to find how both negative emotion symptoms and self-criticism impact college students to injure themselves. In Indonesia, the study of self injury in non-clinical population, especially in college students, was scarce. While the finding of the predictors in urge of self injury is very important in this population, thus the development of pathological behaviour can be anticipated.

The design of the current study was cross-sectional study. Linear multiple regression analysis was done to find the impact of the predictors to the urge of self injury. The current study has 118 college students in Indonesia who engaged self injury at least once in the recent year as a sample. The participants was 18-30 years old, not consuming drugs for mental disorders, and not currently undergoing a psychotherapy. The questionnaire was filled by participants via online website.

The result found that self criticism and negative emotion symptoms have a significant impact to the urge of self injury (R=0,564, p=0,000). Linearly, both of these variables contribute to the urge of self injury for 31 percent. Most of the participants reported: self injury behaviour facilitated themselves to regulate the negative emotions and the method of self injury most committed was by hitting their head and cutting their part of body with sharp object. The mean of urge was found higher in student under the age 23 years old than above.

The result shows that both negative emotion symptoms and self-criticism has considerable influence on the emergence of the urge to self injury. Negative emotion symptoms and self criticism tendencies as a factors that may contribute to vulnerability in college students for using self injury behaviour as a coping mechanism. This finding supports the tenets of escape theory. Both negative emotion symptoms and self criticism trigger an increased in psychological distress. The psychological distress become overwhelming and contribute to the barriers in ability to solve the problem that lead to hurting oneself seemed to be the only possible solution for ending unbearable psychological distress. Therefore, self injury is a form of action to escape from negative feeling and negative self-belief, when other basic self-defenses failed to mitigate. Previous study found other variables as risk factors for self injury behavior, such as emotional dysregulation, quality of interpersonal relationship and personality trait. Based on age of the participants, the result shows that the student at undergraduate level was more vulnerable to develop high self-injury urge than in post-graduate level. Neuropsychology perspective explained that individual under 24 years old was still experiencing brain development in frontal lobes that plays a role in making comprehensive considerations and decisions. Such condition makes one’s more vulnerable to take a risky behavior to solve the problems. Findings from the current study could be a preliminary data in designing intervention to college students who engaged self injury behavior.

Keyword: College student, negative emotion, self criticism, self injury