Terror mismanagement: evidence that mortality salience exacerbates phobic and compulsive behaviors

Terror management theory (TMT) posits that cultural worldviews and self-esteem function to buffer humans from mortality-related anxiety. TMT research has shown that important behaviors are influenced by mortality salience (MS) even when they have no obvious connection to death. However, there has been no attempt to investigate TMT processes in anxious responding. The present research examines that question. In Study 1, compared to a control condition, MS increased anxious responding to spider-related stimuli, but only for participants who met criteria for specific phobia. In Study 2, compared to an aversive control condition, MS increased time spent washing hands, but only for those scoring high on a measure of compulsive hand washing (CHW). In Study 3, compared to a different aversive control condition, MS increased avoidance of a social interaction, but only for those scoring high on a measure of social interaction anxiety. The relevance of TMT in anxious responding is discussed.     

Terror mismanagement: evidence that mortality salience exacerbates attentional bias in social anxiety

Death anxiety is a basic fear underlying a range of psychological conditions, and has been found to increase avoidance in social anxiety. Given that attentional bias is a core feature of social anxiety, the aim of the present study was to examine the impact of mortality salience (MS) on attentional bias in social anxiety. Participants were 36 socially anxious and 37 non-socially anxious individuals, randomly allocated to a MS or control condition. An eye-tracking procedure assessed initial bias towards, and late-stage avoidance of, socially threatening facial expressions. As predicted, socially anxious participants in the MS condition demonstrated significantly more initial bias to social threat than non-socially anxious participants in the MS condition and socially anxious participants in the control condition. However, this effect was not found for late-stage avoidance of social threat. These findings suggest that reminders of death may heighten initial vigilance towards social threat.     

Self-affirmation and mortality salience: affirming values reduces worldview defense and death-thought accessibility

To the extent that cultural worldviews provide meaning in the face of existential concerns, specifically the inevitability of death, affirming a valued aspect of one's worldview should render reminders of death less threatening. The authors report two studies in support of this view. In Study 1, mortality salience led to derogation of a worldview violator unless participants had first affirmed an important value. In Study 2, self-affirmation before a reminder of death was associated with reduced accessibility of death-related thoughts a short while thereafter. The authors propose that actively affirming one's worldview alters reactions to reminders of mortality by reducing the accessibility of death-related thoughts, not by boosting self-esteem. These studies attest to the flexible nature of psychological self-defense and to the central role of cultural worldviews in managing death-related concerns.     

Stereotypes and terror management: evidence that mortality salience enhances stereotypic thinking and preferences

If stereotypes function to protect people against death-related concerns, then mortality salience should increase stereotypic thinking and preferences for stereotype-confirming individuals. Study 1 demonstrated that mortality salience increased stereotyping of Germans. In Study 2, it increased participants' tendency to generate more explanations for stereotype-inconsistent than stereotype-consistent gender role behavior. In Study 3, mortality salience increased participants' liking for a stereotype-consistent African American and decreased their liking for a stereotype-inconsistent African American; control participants exhibited the opposite preference. Study 4 replicated this pattern with evaluations of stereotype-confirming or stereotype-disconfirming men and women. Study 5 showed that, among participants high in need for closure, mortality salience led to decreased liking for a stereotype-inconsistent gay man.     

Psychological defense in anticipation of anxiety: eliminating the potential for anxiety eliminates the effect of mortality salience on worldview defense

A large body of research has shown that when people are reminded of their mortality, their defense of their cultural worldview intensifies. Although some psychological defenses seem to be instigated by negative affective responses to threat, mortality salience does not appear to arouse such affect. Terror management theory posits that the potential to experience anxiety, rather than the actual experience of anxiety, underlies these effects of mortality salience. If this is correct, then mortality-salience effects should be reduced when participants believe they are not capable of reacting to the reminder of mortality with anxiety. In a test of this hypothesis, participants consumed a placebo purported to either block anxiety or enhance memory. Then we manipulated mortality salience, and participants evaluated pro- and anti-American essays as a measure of worldview defense. Although mortality salience intensified worldview defense in the memory-enhancer condition, this effect was completely eliminated in the anxiety-blocker condition. The results suggest that some psychological defenses serve to avert the experience of anxiety rather than to ameliorate actually experienced anxiety.     

Terror management and reactions to undocumented immigrants: mortality salience increases aversion to culturally dissimilar others

The authors examine the idea, derived from Terror Management Theory, that concerns about undocumented immigrants stem from the need to protect death-buffering cultural values against the symbolic threat posed by dissimilar others. It is hypothesized that reminders of death will intensify aversion to culturally dissimilar immigrants. Forty-six university students were randomly assigned to a mortality salience or a control condition prior to evaluating either an illegal alien named Ben Johnson from Vancouver or Carlos Suarez from Mexico City. Consistent with the hypothesis, reactions to the Canadian target did not differ in the control and mortality salience conditions, whereas reactions to the Mexican immigrant were more negative in the mortality salience than in the control condition.     

Terror management and political attitudes: the influence of mortality salience on Germans' defence of the German reunification

From the perspective of terror management theory, reminders of mortality should intensify the desire to maintain faith in one's own cultural worldview. We investigated this notion with regard to attitudes of Germans toward an important political event, the fall of the Berlin wall and German reunification. We found that when reminded of their own death, people with a supportive attitude toward the German reunification showed a more favourable evaluation of a positive essay about the fall of the Berlin wall and a more negative reaction to a critical essay than participants in the control condition. People with a more neutral attitude toward the reunification on the other hand did not show this effect. Practical and theoretical implications are discussed. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Terror management and the vicissitudes of sports fan affiliation: the effects of mortality salience on optimism and fan identification

The present research examined the hypothesis derived from terror management theory that identifications with sports teams shield against the potential consequences of awareness of death. Experiment 1 demonstrated that Dutch participants who were reminded of their death expressed greater optimism about the results of the national soccer team compared to a control condition. Experiment 2 conceptually replicated this finding with American participants and college sports teams. In addition, Experiment 2 tested the hypothesis that success of a team is a prerequisite for sports fan affiliation to function as a buffer against death concerns. Before the college football season began, participants who were reminded about death expressed greater relative preference for a more salient, but less successful college football team over a national college champion basketball team compared to control participants. However, after the football team lost its first game of the season, participants who were reminded about death indicated greater relative preference for the successful basketball team. Results are discussed with regard to the psychological function of social identifications. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Task engagement after mortality salience: The effects of creativity,conformity and connectedness on worldview defence

Terror management research has shown that activating thoughts about mortality (mortality salience) increases defence of one's worldview. This study investigated how worldview defence is affected by engaging in a task that fosters creativity, conformity, or sharing values after being reminded of death. After writing about death or a control topic, participants were randomly assigned to design a t‐shirt with the goal of being as creative as possible, trying to please others but not oneself, or trying to connect with others via shared values. After mortality salience, conforming to others led to increased worldview defence whereas sharing values did not. Further, engaging in a creative task decreased worldview defence after mortality salience. Implications for understanding the interface between different forms of social connectedness, creativity and the management of existential fears are discussed. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Social identity and worldview validation: the effects of ingroup identity primes and mortality salience on value endorsement

In this article, the authors report an investigation of the relationship between terror management and social identity processes by testing for the effects of social identity salience on worldview validation. Two studies, with distinct populations, were conducted to test the hypothesis that mortality salience would lead to worldview validation of values related to a salient social identity. In Study 1, reasonable support for this hypothesis was found with bicultural Aboriginal Australian participants (N = 97). It was found that thoughts of death led participants to validate ingroup and reject outgroup values depending on the social identity that had been made salient. In Study 2, when their student and Australian identities were primed, respectively, Anglo-Australian students (N = 119) validated values related to those identities, exclusively. The implications of the findings for identity-based worldview validation are discussed.     

From the grave to the cradle: evidence that mortality salience engenders a desire for offspring

On the basis of terror management theory, the authors hypothesized that reminders of mortality (mortality salience) should promote the desire for offspring to the extent that it does not conflict with other self-relevant worldviews that also serve to manage existential concerns. In 3 studies, men, but not women, desired more children after mortality salience compared with various control conditions. In support of the authors' hypothesis that women's desire for offspring was inhibited as a function of concerns about career success, Study 3 showed that career strivings moderated the effect of mortality salience on a desire for offspring for female participants only; furthermore, Study 4 revealed that when the compatibility of having children and a career was made salient, female participants responded to mortality salience with an increased number of desired children. Taken together, the findings suggest that a desire for offspring can function as a terror management defense mechanism.     

Unconscious vigilance: worldview defense without adaptations for terror, coalition, or uncertainty management

Individuals subtly reminded of death, coalitional challenges, or feelings of uncertainty display exaggerated preferences for affirmations and against criticisms of their cultural in-groups. Terror management, coalitional psychology, and uncertainty management theories postulate this "worldview defense" effect as the output of mechanisms evolved either to allay the fear of death, foster social support, or reduce anxiety by increasing adherence to cultural values. In 4 studies, we report evidence for an alternative perspective. We argue that worldview defense owes to unconscious vigilance, a state of accentuated reactivity to affective targets (which need not relate to cultural worldviews) that follows detection of subtle alarm cues (which need not pertain to death, coalitional challenges, or uncertainty). In Studies 1 and 2, death-primed participants produced exaggerated ratings of worldview-neutral affective targets. In Studies 3 and 4, subliminal threat manipulations unrelated to death, coalitional challenges, or uncertainty evoked worldview defense. These results are discussed as they inform evolutionary interpretations of worldview defense and future investigations of the influence of unconscious alarm on judgment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved).     

Connecting terror management and dissonance theory: Evidence that mortality salience increases the preference for supporting information after decisions

From the perspective of terror management theory, reminders of mortality should intensify the desire to pursue cognitive consistency. The authors investigated this notion with regard to dissonance theory starting from the finding of research on "selective exposure to information" that after having made a decision, people prefer consonant over dissonant information. The authors found that following mortality salience, people indeed showed an increased preference for information that supported their decision compared to information conflicting with it. However, this only occurred with regard to a worldview-relevant decision case. For a fictitious decision scenario, mortality salience did not affect information seeking. Practical and theoretical implications are discussed.     

The role of control motivation in mortality salience effects on ingroup support and defense

Terror management research has shown that mortality salience (MS) leads to increased support and defense of cultural ingroups and their norms (i.e., worldview defense, WD). The authors investigated whether these effects can be understood as efforts to restore a generalized sense of control by strengthening one's social ingroup. In Studies 1-3, the authors found that WD was only increased following pure death salience, compared with both dental pain salience and salience of self-determined death. As both the pure death and the self-determined death conditions increased accessibility of death-related thoughts (Study 4), these results do not emerge because only the pure death induction makes death salient. At the same time, Study 5 showed that implicitly measured control motivation was increased in the pure death salience condition but not under salience of both self-determined death and dental pain. Finally, in Study 6, the authors manipulated MS and control salience (CS) independently and found a main effect for CS but not for MS on WD. The results are discussed with regard to a group-based control restoration account of terror management findings.     

Fear of self-annihilation and existential uncertainty as predictors of worldview defense: Comparing terror management and uncertainty theories

Terror management theory (TMT) proposes that thoughts of death trigger a concern about self-annihilation that motivates the defense of cultural worldviews. In contrast, uncertainty theorists propose that thoughts of death trigger feelings of uncertainty that motivate worldview defense. University students (N = 414) completed measures of the chronic fear of self-annihilation and existential uncertainty as well as the need for closure. They then evaluated either a meaning threat stimulus or a control stimulus. Consistent with TMT, participants with a high fear of self-annihilation and a high need for closure showed the greatest dislike of the meaning threat stimulus, even after controlling for their existential uncertainty. Contrary to the uncertainty perspective, fear of existential uncertainty showed no significant effects.     

Unitization mitigates interference by intrinsic negative emotion in familiarity and recollection of associative memory: Electrophysiological evidence

Emotion exerts varied influences on memory. While task-relevant item memory is often enhanced by emotion, associative memory is generally impaired. Unitization is known to improve associative memory, but its effects and mechanisms in protecting associative memory from emotional interference are rather obscure. The current study investigated associative memory by employing experimental manipulation of unitization (vs. nonunitization) encoding strategy and stimulus emotion (neutral, intrinsic negative, and extrinsic negative), combined with event-related potential (ERP) signatures of familiarity (FN400 old/new effects) and recollection (parietal late positive component/LPC old/new effects) in memory recognition. Both behavioral and ERP indices of associative recognition from the nonunitization group confirmed emotional interference in associative memory. Importantly, it was primarily intrinsic (vs. extrinsic) emotion that impeded associative memory. Unitization encoding improved memory performance in general, accompanied by enhanced recollection process and induction of familiarity process, which is typically not involved in associative memory recognition and was indeed absent in the nonunitization group. Importantly, unitization helped to preserve behavioral performance (specifically, response speed though not recognition strength) from interference by intrinsic emotion while largely reversed the detriment of intrinsic emotion on ERP indices of familiarity and recollection processes. Interestingly, a synergy between intrinsic emotion and unitization encoding was observed, which could underpin the facilitation of familiarity process in associative recognition of emotional pairs. Overall, current findings highlight interference by intrinsic emotion in associative memory, which is nonetheless responsive to mitigation by unitization encoding.     

Mortality salience and religion: divergent effects on the defense of cultural worldviews for the religious and the non‐religious

Religious and non‐religious individuals differ in their core beliefs. The religious endorse a supernatural, divinely inspired view of the world, while the non‐religious hold largely secular worldviews. As a result they may respond differently to existential threats. Three studies confirmed this prediction. After a mortality salience (MS) or control prime, Canadian participants read, and responded to, an essay hostile to Western civilization, allegedly written by a radical Muslim student. Results indicated that the non‐religious reliably showed the conventional cultural worldview defense by devaluating the content of the message and decreasing support for the civil rights of anti‐Western individuals when death was salient. No such effect was found for the religious. Religious and non‐religious participants did not differ in self‐esteem levels or in death‐thought accessibility. These results suggest that a religious stance among believers plays a defensive role against the awareness of death. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Evidence for the specificity of control motivations in worldview defense: Distinguishing compensatory control from uncertainty management and terror management processes

Research inspired by the compensatory control model (CCM) shows that people compensate for personal control threats by bolstering aspects of the cultural worldview that afford external control. According to the CCM these effects stem from the motivation to maintain perceived order, but it is alternatively possible that they represent indirect efforts to bolster distally related psychological structures described by uncertainty management theory (self-relevant certainty) and terror management theory (death-transcendence). To assess whether compensatory control processes play a unique role in worldview defense, we hypothesized that personal control threats would increase affirmation of cultural constructs that specifically bolster order more so than constructs that bolster distally related structures. The results of 5 studies provide converging support for this hypothesis in the context of attitudes toward diverse cultural constructs (Study 1: national culture; Studies 2 and 3: consumer products;  and : political candidates). Also supporting hypotheses, uncertainty salience and mortality salience elicited greater affirmation of identity- and immortality-conferring targets, respectively, compared to order-conferring constructs. Discussion focuses on the value of different perspectives on existential motivation for predicting specific forms of worldview defense.     

From terror to joy: automatic tuning to positive affective information following mortality salience

Reminders of death tend to produce strong cognitive and behavioral responses, but little or no emotional response. In three experiments, mortality salience produced an automatic coping response that involved tuning to positive emotional information. Subjects showed increased accessibility of positive emotional information (Experiments 1 and 3) and gave more weight to positive emotion in their judgments of word similarity (Experiment 2) after contemplating death than after thinking about dental pain. This automatic coping response was found both after a delay (Experiments 1 and 2) and directly after the mortality-salience manipulation (Experiment 3), which suggests that the coping process begins immediately. Tuning to positive emotional information in response to mortality salience was unconscious and counterintuitive (Experiment 3). These findings shed light on the coping process that ensues immediately following mortality salience and help to explain why a delay is often necessary to produce effects in line with terror management theory.     

The protective identity: Evidence that mortality salience heightens the clarity and coherence of the self-concept

Research guided by terror management theory has shown that self-esteem provides a buffer against mortality concerns. The current research extends the theory to examine whether clarity and coherence in the structure of the self-concept serve a terror management function independent of enhancing self-esteem. Specifically, five studies tested whether mortality salience (MS) heightens diverse tendencies to clarify and integrate self-relevant knowledge, especially in individuals predisposed to seek structured knowledge. MS led high, but not low, structure-seeking participants to prefer coherent (Study 1) clearly-defined (Study 2), and simply organized (Study 3) conceptions of their personal characteristics. Also, MS led high structure-seeking participants to prefer causal coherence in recent experience (Study 4) and meaningful connections between past events and their current self (Study 5). Supporting the specificity of these effects on self-concept structuring, MS increased self-enhancement in Studies 1, 4, and 5 but these effects were not moderated by preference for structured knowledge.