A Terror Management Perspective on the Persuasiveness of Fear Appeals

We use terror management theory (TMT) to show that the nature of the threatening consequences included in fear‐appeal communications influences the responses to the messages promoted in such communications. On the basis of differences between death‐related consequences and non‐death‐related consequences, they provide an explanation for maladaptive responses to fear appeals. Results from 2 experiments indicate that participants who were highly committed to a worldview of drinking alcohol rejected socially acceptable attitudes toward drinking and driving when the message containing such attitudes was accompanied by a fear appeal that contained death as a consequence, but not when fear appeals contained the fear of arrest or serious injury. Participants perceived their level of experienced fear to be the same across the experimental conditions. The results have implications for considering the qualitative nature of the threatening consequence in fear‐appeal research and for using TMT to understand maladaptive responses to fear‐appeal communications.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Terror Management and Personality: Variations in the Psychological Defense Against the Awareness of Mortality

Drawing on terror management theory (TMT), we discuss the psychological motivations that shape personality at two levels: the characteristically human personality common to us all and the individual differences that distinguish some people from others. TMT posits that the motivation to protect the self against deep-rooted fears about mortality drives people to maintain meaningful, reliable conceptions of reality and positive evaluations of themselves, two broad tendencies that form the foundation of every person’s personality. We review studies showing that mortality reminders increase efforts to bolster cultural sources of meaning and self-esteem in similar ways across individuals and cultures. TMT also posits that individual differences in personality partly reflect the different sources of meaning and self-esteem that people invest in to assuage mortality fears. We review evidence that individual differences predict the degree and direction of people’s defensive responses to mortality reminders. Directions for future research are discussed.     

A Meta-analytic Review of the Role of Child Anxiety Sensitivity in Child Anxiety

Conflicting findings exist regarding (1) whether anxiety sensitivity (AS) is a construct distinct from anxiety in children and (2) the specific nature of the role of AS in child anxiety. This study uses meta-analytic techniques to (1) determine whether youth (ages 6–18 years) have been reported to experience AS, (2) examine whether AS differentiates anxiety disordered youth from youth without diagnoses, and (3) ascertain whether AS distinguishes youth with panic disorder from those with other anxiety disorders. The weighted mean effect size analyses included 15 studies and 6,579 participants. Results suggested positive correlational relationships between AS and anxiety for children (r = 0.26) and adolescents (r = 0.36) and higher levels of AS for anxiety disordered youth than non-clinical youth (d = 0.64). Findings tentatively suggested higher levels of AS for youth with panic disorder than youth diagnosed with other anxiety disorders. Implications and future directions in the research of child AS are discussed.     

A Social Psychological Perspective

Ethics is normative; ethics indicates, in broad terms, what researchers should do. For example, researchers should respect human participants. Empirical study tells us what actually happens. Empirical research is often needed to fine-tune the best ways to achieve normative objectives, for example, to discover how best to achieve the dual aims of gaining important knowledge and respecting participants. Ethical decision making by scientists and institutional review boards should not be based on hunches and anecdotes (e.g., about such matters as what information potential research participants would want to know and what they understand, or what they consider to be acceptable risks). These questions should be answered through empirical research. Some of the preceding articles in this special issue illustrate uses of empirical research on research ethics. This article places empirical research on research ethics into broader perspective and challenges investigators to use the tools of their disciplines to proactively solve ethical problems for which there currently exist no empirically proven solutions.     

Terror Management Theory and Identity: The Effect of the 9/11 Terrorist Attacks on Anxiety and Identity Change

Baumeister and Muraven (1996) reasoned that those who have a well-formed identity should express a greater amount of fear when faced with the prospect of their own death. In Study 1, terror management theory methodology was applied to test this hypothesis. The results show that individuals who were exploring their identity had greater identity exploration scores when reminded of their death in comparison to those who were not given such a reminder. In Study 2, the effects of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on identity and anxiety were examined using a terrorism salience approach. The results show that reminders of the terrorist attacks produced greater anxiety in those who were exploring their identity and less anxiety in those who were not exploring. Terrorism salience also produced greater identity commitment, especially in those who were exploring their identity.     

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.     

Chaotic-Enmeshment and Anxiety: The Mediating Role of Psychological Flexibility and Self-Compassion

With anxiety becoming the most prevalent mental health issue among the college student population, it is important to understand the factors that are associated with symptomology. This study aims to expand the research on the interrelationship between family functioning, intrapsychic factors, and anxiety. Guided by the circumplex model of family systems, the current study explores the link between college student (N?=?500) chaotically-enmeshed family functioning and anxiety, and whether psychological flexibility and self-compassion mediate this relationship. Multiple-sample latent structural equation modeling results revealed that higher levels of chaotically-enmeshed family functioning was significantly associated with lower levels of psychological flexibility and self-compassion levels, and that psychological flexibility and self-compassion mediated the relationship between chaotic-enmeshment and anxiety. Implications for family therapists who provide services to this population are discussed.     

Test Anxiety: A Cross-Cultural Perspective

The present paper examines test anxiety from a cross-cultural perspective with specific reference to the Indian and American cultures. The construct of test anxiety has been examined in many cultures all over the world. In this review, the importance of understanding and incorporating contextual factors in cross-cultural research is emphasized. Moreover, some of the methodological issues related to investigating culture-behavior relationship are discussed. Specifically, the derived-etic approach for conducting cross-cultural research is espoused. Then, research findings from western, cross-cultural, and Indian studies on test anxiety are reviewed. Consistent with the individualistic orientation of the western society, much of the research in the western world has adopted a de-contextualized approach. Inasmuch as many of the cross-cultural and Indian studies on test anxiety have their roots in western research, they have ignored the cultural context as well. To address this void, contextual variables relevant to test anxiety in the Indian setting are examined and hypotheses regarding the nature of test anxiety in Indian children are proposed. Finally, a research agenda is presented to examine these hypotheses using a derived-etic approach.     

Shake and Fake: the Role of Interview Anxiety in Deceptive Impression Management

We investigated whether anxiety about self-presentation concerns during interviews (i.e., interview anxiety) is associated with applicants’ use of deceptive impression management (IM) tactics. We examined the relationship between interview anxiety and deceptive IM, and we examined whether the personality traits of honesty-humility and extraversion would be indirectly related to deceptive IM through interview anxiety. Participants (N?=?202) were recruited after an interview for a research assistant position. Interview anxiety scores were positively related to deceptive IM. Furthermore, there was evidence of a negative indirect effect of honesty-humility on deceptive IM, via overall interview anxiety. Also, extraversion was indirectly associated with deceptive IM through interview anxiety. Results suggest that deceptive IM can be used as a protective mechanism to maintain self-esteem or to avoid the loss of rewards. This paper is the first to examine the role of interview anxiety in interview faking.

     

旅游心理机制的文化学剖析

旅游作为人类文化的创造物,其文化因子深深地根植于旅游者的心灵、凝固于旅游者的血脉,成为调适行为规范和自我塑造的理想和目标。本文以文化学功能理论的观点,研究旅游的心理潜意识,从游的超越解脱功能、游的自我转换历程、游的自我升华途径和游的“在与不在”的超然状态等文化心理现象探究旅游心理文化机制的内涵与意义。     

刑事律师法律地位的三维考察

律师对于刑事辩护业务缺乏热情,刑事诉讼中律师参与刑事辩护的比例有减无增,这种现象与法律和社会对律师角色的片面认识有关。律师执业的个体性、律师辩护的有偿性、律师为犯罪嫌疑人、被告人服务的专一性,使人们对辩护律师的角色认识仅仅停留在把律师作为当事人的辩护人这一点上。然而,无论从应然还是从实然的意义上,我们都应当承认,辩护律师不只是当事人合法权益的保护者,而且也是社会正义的维护者、刑事诉讼过程的监督者     

Culture and Terror Management: What is “Culture” in Cultural Psychology and Terror Management Theory?

Cultural psychology underscores the importance of culture in understanding human psychology. More recently, Terror Management Theory (TMT) also advanced the importance of culture from a perspective that regards culture as a tool for coping with existential concerns. This paper compares these two perspectives with respect to the focus of their theoretical inquiries and the conceptualizations of culture. A brief review of relevant TMT research is provided to familiarize readers to this literature. Theoretical implications and directions for future research are presented.