Terror versus Sadness after Mortality Salience
Creators: name: Chengli, Huang
Publisher: name: Open Science Framework
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: Social Psychology
subject: Social and Behavioral Sciences
subject: Psychology
subject: FOS: Psychology

description: According to Becker (1973), all human behaviors are motivated by a denial of death. Inspired by this idea, Greenberg, Pyszczynski, and Solomon (1986) proposed Terror Management Theory (TMT), which posits that humans suffer from the omnipresent potential for anxiety engendered by the uniquely human awareness of mortality. In order to control the potential for anxiety, human beings thus integrate themselves into a unique cultural worldview and acquire self-esteem by living up to the standards of value inherent in their own cultural worldview (Pyszczynski et al., 1999). Terror management theory has been supported by a large number of empirical studies (Pyszczynski et al., 1999, 2004), but the role of emotion in terror management has long been a controversial topic. Numerous studies have found that there is no significant difference in self-reported emotions (both negative and positive) between mortality salience (MS) groups and control groups, suggesting that mortality salience does not elicit any reliable change in affect (i.e., the “affect-free claim” (Lambert et al., 2014)). However, some studies have raised doubts about this finding. For example, Routledge et al. (2010) found that death-related cognition increased negative affect and state anxiety for individuals with low self-esteem, and these effects occurred only after participants finished a distraction task, which suggests that the time at which emotions are measured may moderate the MS effect on emotions. Moreover, studies using objective measures of emotions (e.g., functional magnetic resonance imaging (Quirin et al., 2012), facial electromyography (Arndt et al., 2001), and linguistic inquiry and word count (Lambert et al., 2014)) have consistently demonstrated a significant mortality salience effect on emotions. Therefore, some researchers have proposed that it may be the latent emotional experience, rather than the actual emotional experience, that influences behavior after MS (Greenberg et al., 2003; Pyszczynski et al., 1999). Consistent with this perspective, Greenberg et al. (2003) found that eliminating the potential for anxiety by placebo can effectively eliminate the effect of mortality salience on worldview defense. In the same vein, Webber et al. (2015) found that existentially threatening stimuli did not increase death thought accessibility (DTA) and worldview defense when the emotion was misattributed or down-regulated via reappraisal. In summary, although a number of studies have found that death-related stimuli do not result in differences in self-reported emotions, studies measuring emotions with more objective methods have found that latent emotions influence behavior following heightened mortality salience. We theorize that individuals may experience two different basic emotions (fear and sadness) following MS. Fear serves a protective function in evolved mammalian defense systems (Öhman, 2008). Therefore, terror management theory views the fear of death as a primary emotion that is caused by the awareness of self-annihilation and emerges as a function of the basic self-preservation instinct (Solomon et al., 1991). However, reflection upon one’s own mortality should also invoke sadness, the prototypical emotion experienced when individuals permanently lose what they value (e.g., losing a person or object important to the self, or losing the world one loves after death) (Bonanno et al., 2008). Sadness is associated with personal reflection about an irrevocable loss (Bonanno et al., 2008). Therefore, we assume that thinking about death from a reflective perspective may produce more sadness than fear. Russell (1980) proposed the Dimensional Model, and divided affects into two dimensions, i.e., arousal and valence. In this model, terror is a highly aroused negative emotion, and sadness is a moderately aroused negative emotion. Therefore, thinking about death from the perspective of reflection may reduce physiological arousal. To explore the latent emotions felt after MS, this study will adopt two different paradigms, i.e., mortality salience paradigm (MS) (Rosenblatt et al., 1989) and the modified death reflect (DR) paradigm (Cozzolino et al., 2004). In the latter paradigm, participants need to imagine a death scenario and answer 4 questions applied to induce actual death, life review, and perspective-taking. To control the confounding variables better, the current study uses the two questions about life review and perspective-taking, since they embody death reflecting. Previous study found that death-related cognition increased negative affect for individuals with low self-esteem but not for those with high self-esteem (Routledge et al., 2010). Therefore, participants' self-esteem will be measured as a moderator. Finally, participants with suicidal ideation may have different views on death, so the participants’ suicidal ideation was measured to explore whether it moderated the effect of MS on mood. Hypothesis (A) People feel both sadness and fear after thinking about death. (B) People feel more sadness than fear after reflecting mortality rather than just mortality salience.