Hopelessly mortal: The role of mortality salience, immortality and trait self-esteem in personal hope

Beyond Wishful Thinking during the COVID-19 Pandemic: How Hope Reduces the Effects of Death Arousal on Hostility toward Outgroups among Conservative and Liberal Media Users for COVID-19 Information

The COVID-19 pandemic has made death more salient to individuals, which has partly contributed to the amplification of hostility toward others who have different perspectives from oneself. Recognizing that the politicization of COVID-19 and the resulting polarization have become increasingly critical issues, this study investigates how death-related thinking and hope about the pandemic can affect hostility toward outgroups as well as how conservative and liberal media usages moderate the indirect effects of hope. An online survey experiment of people in the U.S. (N = 759) during the pandemic showed that death arousal reduced hope and that these low levels of hope exacerbated hostility toward outgroups in the pandemic context, confirming the positive impact of hope. Importantly, however, our study did not show that hope had a beneficial impact for heavy conservative media users.

Facing a Real Threat of Death: Dynamic Changes in Death-Thought Accessibility

Purpose

This study explored the relationship between emotion and death-thought accessibility (DTA) in individuals experiencing true mortality salience (MS), specifically, patients with cancer.

Patients and Methods

The study included 255 participants; among them, 132 patients had cancer and represented the MS group, and 123 had dental pain and served as a control group. Participants completed the Projective Diseases Attitude Assessment Questionnaire to induce priming, completed an affect scale, completed one of four calculation tasks as manipulation of cognitive load (all four were done over several sessions), and performed a Pinyin-Chinese characters exercise to measure DTA.

Results

MS was associated with strong negative emotional arousal. When these negative emotions are generated, they enter an individual’s consciousness and activate proximal defense mechanisms. At this point, DTA can be measured. Patients with cancer had significantly higher levels of DTA in the high-frequency cognitive load condition than in the other three conditions (no task, simple delay task, and single cognitive load task). Patients with dental pain had significantly higher levels of DTA in the no task and simple delay conditions than in the single cognitive load or high-frequency cognitive load conditions. This study also found that negative experiences without MS (specifically, dental pain) are associated with higher levels of DTA.

Conclusion

These findings suggest that in addition to death-related events, both negative and stress-inducing events can produce DTA.

The effect of death education on fear of death amongst Italian adolescents: A nonrandomized controlled study

This study describes the psychological effects of death education in reducing the fear of death in a large cohort of Italian adolescents. Following the constructs of "distal defenses" and "mortality salience" of Terror Management Theory, this research intervention also evaluated the proposition that spirituality and belief in an afterlife could provide an effective buffer against fear of death. Five hundred thirty-four Italian high school students participated in a school-based death education program with an experimental group and a nonrandomized control condition. Using a pre/post-course design, we assessed fear of death, alexithymia, and representations of death and spirituality for both groups. Results confirmed that the course reduced death fears and the representation of death as annihilation while also enhancing spirituality. In particular, the older participants in the death education course increased their spirituality and decreased their fear of death, whereas females reduced their conviction that death was an absolute annihilation. Finally, the structural model suggested that alexithymia mediates the relationships among fear of death and spirituality; in particular, fear of death predicted more alexithymia and more alexithymia predicted lower spirituality.

When sex doesn't sell to men: mortality salience, disgust and the appeal of products and advertisements featuring sexualized women

Although men typically hold favorable views of advertisements featuring female sexuality, from a Terror Management Theory perspective, this should be less the case when thoughts of human mortality are salient. Two experiments conducted in South Korea supported this hypothesis across a variety of products (e.g., perfume and vodka). Men became more negative towards advertisements featuring female sexuality, and had reduced purchase intentions for those products, after thinking about their own mortality. Study 2 found that these effects were mediated by heightened disgust. Mortality thoughts did not impact women in either study. These findings uniquely demonstrate that thoughts of death interact with female sex-appeal to influence men’s consumer choices, and that disgust mediates these processes. Implications for the role of emotion, and cultural differences, in terror management, for attitudes toward female sexuality, and for marketing strategies are discussed.