Integrating Terror Management Theory into Fear Appeal Research

Fear appeal communications have sustained the interest of researchers for over a half century. The dominant paradigm guiding fear appeal research asserts that differences in level of fear lead to differences in the persuasiveness of a message. Research grounded in the level of fear perspective has produced equivocal results, failed to explain why fear appeals sometimes backfire, and has not provided an a priori explanation for who may reject fear appeal messages. By emphasizing differences between individuals’ responses to the fear of death versus the fear of physically or socially undesirable consequences, terror management theory (TMT) offers a complementary theoretical perspective that may overcome the shortcomings of extant fear appeal research. This article reviews extant theoretical approaches to fear appeal research and summarizes the central tenets of TMT. A comparison of extant theories to TMT suggests that incorporating TMT into future fear appeal research may improve both the explanatory and predictive power of fear appeal theories.     

The Appeal of Tragedy: A Terror Management Perspective

The experiment reported in this article assessed the terror management explanation of the appeal of tragedy. From this perspective, vicarious experience of tragedy, such as through film and literature, provides a safe way of approaching the fear associated with one's own mortality. Thus, we hypothesized that reminding participants of their mortality would increase liking for and emotional response to a tragic excerpt from a novel. Participants were randomly assigned to answer open-ended questions about either their own death or a neutral topic and then read two excerpts from Ernest Hemingway novels, one tragic and one nontragic in content. In support of the terror management hypothesis, participants in the mortality salience condition responded more emotionally to, and were more touched by, the tragic excerpt, found the nontragic excerpt less enjoyable, and cared less for the female character in the nontragic passage than did the control participants.     

A Terror Management Perspective on the Role of Death-Related Anxiety in Psychological Dysfunction

Building on previous existential theorizing, terror management theory provides a unique approach to conceptualizing the development, maintenance, and impact of psychological disorders. The theory suggests that awareness of mortality creates the potential for anxiety, which is managed by an anxiety-buffering system consisting of one's cultural worldview, self-esteem, and interpersonal attachments. The pursuit of meaning, personal value, and interpersonal connections that motivates much human behavior is driven, in part, by the need to control this potential for death-related anxiety. This article provides an overview of terror management theory and a discussion of its implications for understanding clinical conditions, along with a review of research exploring the roles of death-related anxiety and the anxiety-buffering system in anxiety disorders, posttraumatic stress disorder, and depression.     

Dedicate Your Life to the Company! A Terror Management Perspective on Organizations

Terror management research has examined many institutions and beliefs, which provide people with a sense of psychological security against death awareness. However, one important area has yet to receive attention: the workplace. For many employees, corporate culture is not only connected to earning a salary, but also to a sense of security and even personal transcendence. We present evidence that pro‐company judgments can serve as psychological defenses under existential threat. In Study 1, following mortality salience, employees gave a more favorable evaluation of the company‐praising essay and a more negative evaluation of the critical one. In Study 2, employees and students at a German university were more likely to endorse aspects of organizational culture under mortality salience.     

How Power States Influence the Persuasiveness of Top‐Dog versus Underdog Appeals

Although both top‐dog and underdog positioning appeals are widely used in marketing and advertising, little is known about which strategy is more effective in persuading consumers. By introducing a sense of power, a social variable that is inherently relevant to the nature of the top‐dog versus underdog classification, we propose that consumers' responses to these two appeals are influenced by their psychological experience of power. Specifically, low‐power consumers will respond to top‐dog appeals more favorably because associating with top dogs facilitates power restoration. In contrast, high‐power consumers will respond to underdog appeals more favorably because supporting underdogs facilitates power expression. In four experimental studies, we provide consistent support for our main predictions as well as the underlying processes. Studies 1 and 2 demonstrate the differential effect of consumers' power states on their attitudes toward top‐dog versus underdog appeals. Providing process evidence, Studies 3 and 4 identify boundary conditions under which the basic effect was eliminated. These findings contribute to the persuasion literature and power research and provide important implications for positioning strategy and advertisement development.     

The Effects of Instructor Fear Appeals and Moral Appeals on Cheating-Related Attitudes and Behavior of University Students

Little attention has been paid in academic dishonesty literature to empirically testing the effectiveness of different instructor communication strategies to minimize cheating. Using a quasi-experimental design, we compared the effectiveness of instructor fear appeals and moral appeals on student cheating-related attitudes and behavior. Cheating was most strongly associated with neutralizing attitudes in the moral appeal condition. Also, the relationship between observation of others cheating and self-reported cheating behaviors was stronger in both treatment conditions than in the control condition. Although a trend toward less cheating in the treatment conditions was evident, it did not attain statistical significance.     

Fear Appeals and Persuasion: A Review and Update of the Extended Parallel Process Model

The Extended Parallel Process Model (EPPM; Communication Monographs, 59, 1992, 329) is a predominant message design theory in the social science fear appeal literature that provides a framework for effective communication of health‐related information. This paper provides a review and update of the theory and the use of fear appeals in persuasion. First, a brief overview of the EPPM is provided. Then, Littlejohn and Foss (Theories of Human Communication, 2005, Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth) criteria for evaluation of theory are used as a guide for reviewing research guided by the EPPM in terms of the consistency of data with theoretical predictions, how it has been adjusted and extended through research findings, and a discussion of future research to expand social scientific knowledge about fear appeals and persuasion. It is concluded that the EPPM has advanced our understanding of how fear appeals operate and continues to generate questions for research in risk messaging.     

Self-Referenced Fear and Guilt Appeals: The Moderating Role of Self-Construal

Results from 2 studies on advertising to reduce the incidence of drinking and driving show that the effect of self- vs. other-referencing on the persuasiveness of fear and guilt appeals is moderated by definitions of the self (independent vs. interdependent self-construals). For people who hold a predominantly independent self-construal, superiority of self- vs. other-referencing holds for guilt appeals, but the opposite is true for fear appeals. For people who hold a predominantly interdependent self-construal, other-referenced and self-referenced messages are equally recalled and equally favorable for both fear and guilt appeals.     

Prosocial Attitudes toward Money from Terror Management Perspective: Death Transcendence through Spirituality

Based on Terror Management Theory (TMT), we suggest that spirituality and prosocial attitudes toward money have a similar defensive function in resisting existential anxiety. In mortality salient (MS) situations, both spirituality and prosocial money attitudes afford symbolic immortality by self-transcendent connections. In four studies, we found that activating death awareness weakened people’s subjective love of money (Study 1) and predicted increased spending willingness on prosocial rather than proself goals (Studies 2, 3, and 4). More importantly, MS effects on money attitudes were smaller when people’s trait spirituality was high (vs. low; Studies 1, 2, 3) and when people were primed to experience spirituality (vs. happiness control condition; Study 4). For low spirituality people, the association between MS and prosocial spending also depended on the capacity of money spending to contribute positively to one’s feelings of self-worth (Study 3). Theoretical implications and future directions are discussed.     

Reports of My Death Anxiety Have Been Greatly Exaggerated: A Critique of Terror Management Theory from an Evolutionary Perspective

Although terror management theory's proponents claim that it is an evolutionary theory of human behavior, its major tenets are implausible when examined carefully from a modern evolutionary perspective. We explain why it is unlikely that natural selection would have designed a “survival instinct” or innate “fear of death,” nor an anxiety-reduction system in general, or worldview-defense system in particular, to ameliorate such fears. We argue that results of mortality-salience experiments are better explained as by-products of a psychological system of coalitional computation that evolved for a variety of functions, including defense against other humans, that is activated by certain kinds of death-related thoughts.     

恐惧管理对道德五基准及道德判断的影响

本研究探讨恐惧管理理论对道德五种基本准则以及道德判断的影响。85名被试随机分配到实验组与控制组。全部被试首先完成道德五基准问卷。实验组被试接受死亡凸显提示后观看短片并完成一系列道德两难问题的判断;控制组接受一般负性事件提示。研究结果显示,相对于控制组而言,实验组被试倾向于作出直觉而非理性判断,并且死亡凸显对道德直觉判断的影响受到厌恶情绪的中介作用。同时,当故事情节发生转换时,实验组被试倾向于作出与原有道德直觉规范相一致的道德判断。本研究从恐惧管理理论出发,为道德判断的情理之争提供了启示。     

The Effect of Authority on the Persuasiveness of Mathematical Arguments

Three experiments are reported that investigate the extent to which an authority figure influences the level of persuasion undergraduate students and research-active mathematicians invest in mathematical arguments. We demonstrate that, in some situations, both students and researchers rate arguments as being more persuasive when they are associated with an expert mathematician than when the author is anonymous. We develop a model that accounts for these data by suggesting that, for both students and researchers, an authority figure only plays a role when there is already some uncertainty about the argument's mathematical status. Implications for pedagogy, and for future research, are discussed.     

The Role of Fear in Our Love of God: A Lutheran Perspective

Abstract : Lutheran Christians in particular have been taught in the Catechism to “fear and love God.” This article questions the assumption that in a contemporary context, fear and love can helpfully co‐exist, examining the different ways in which “fear of God” is a challenging concept for twenty‐first‐century Christians to understand. The article concludes with suggestions for how “fear of God” might be re‐interpreted and re‐articulated in a constructive way, leading to a more meaningful Christian life in the world today.     

Fear Appeals in Political Rhetoric about Terrorism: An Analysis of Speeches by Australian Prime Minister Howard

This paper explores fear-arousing content in Australian former Prime Minister John Howard's political rhetoric about terrorism. We coded 27 speeches delivered between September 2001 and November 2007 for the presence of statements promoting fear-consistent appraisals ( Smith & Lazarus, 1993 ). Fear-arousing content was present in 24 of these speeches, but the amount of fear-arousing content varied markedly. In particular, rhetoric that raised doubts about the capacity of Australia and its allies to cope with terrorism was most strongly present in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq and at times of declining support for government policies. Textual analysis of three key speeches confirmed a marked difference between Howard's speech given immediately after the attacks on September 11, 2001, and the second and third speeches presented prior to and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. These findings indicate that Howard has not consistently employed fear-inducing rhetoric in his speeches about terrorism, but that particular speeches appear to take this form, raising the possibility that fear-arousing rhetoric may have been selectively deployed to support his political purposes at those times.     

恐惧管理研究:新热点、质疑与争论

恐惧管理理论(Terror Management Theory,简称TMT)认为,死亡恐惧为人类发展提出了新的适应性问题,多重机制因此进化而来以维护心理平衡。大量的实证研究验证了TMT的基本假设,但在解释死亡突显效应背后的动机上还存在争议。该文首先介绍了由文化世界观、自尊及亲密关系组成的三重防御系统,之后重点评述了批评者从认知闭合、意义维持、联结动机以及控制等视角对死亡突显效应背后真实动机做出的新的阐释,最后指出未来研究应当尝试将死亡觉知的必然性与不确定性所引发的不同效应分离开来。     

The Urge to Splurge: A Terror Management Account of Materialism and Consumer Behavior

This article presents terror management theory (TMT) as a way to understand how the human awareness of death affects materialism, conspicuous consumption, and consumer decisions. The pursuit of wealth and culturally desired commodities are hypothesized to reinforce those beliefs that function to protect people from existential anxieties. Following a brief overview of TMT and research, evidence is reviewed that explicates how intimations of mortality increase materialism as a way to enhance self‐esteem and affects consumer decisions that support one's cultural worldview. Adverse consequences of materialistic and consumeristic worldviews are described and the challenges for future research to discover ways to alleviate them are considered.     

A Psychiatrist's Experience of Death Terror

ABSTRACT: An episode of total paralysis (from medication) with full consciousness is described and its relation to death terror is discussed.     

Fear,Anger, and Voting for the Far Right: Evidence From the November 13, 2015 Paris Terror Attacks

The conjecture that negative emotions underpin support for far‐right politics is common among pundits and scholars. The conventional account holds that authoritarian populists catalyze public anxiety about the changing social order and/or deteriorating national economic conditions, and this anxiety subsequently drives up support for the far right. We propose that while emotions do indeed play an independent causal role in support for far‐right parties and policies, that support is more likely built upon the public’s anger rather than fear. This article explores the relative impact of fear and anger in reaction to the 2015 Paris terror attacks on the propensity to vote for the French far‐right party, the Front National, in the 2015 regional elections. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we find that anger is associated with voting for the Front National, while fear is associated with voting against the Front National. Moreover, anger boosts the Front National vote most powerfully among far‐right and authoritarian voters. On the other hand, fear reduces support for the far right among those same groups.     

恐怖主义与对公民自由的袭击

"九一一"的惨剧迄今已两年了,美国人仍身处巨大的危险之中.这危险来自两个方面.第一点是显而易见的,那就是将来还可能发生的恐怖主义袭击.资金充备的恐怖主义分子在一些国家生活并受训,他们抱着必死之决心,决意要夺去美国人的生命.一旦他们获得核武器,就可能制造出更加惨不忍睹的悲剧.