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When death is not a problem: Regulating implicit negative affect under mortality salience
Author(s) -
Lüdecke Christina,
Baumann Nicola
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
scandinavian journal of psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.743
H-Index - 72
eISSN - 1467-9450
pISSN - 0036-5564
DOI - 10.1111/sjop.12243
Subject(s) - mortality salience , terror management theory , psychology , affect (linguistics) , death anxiety , salience (neuroscience) , social psychology , personality , anxiety , action (physics) , developmental psychology , clinical psychology , cognitive psychology , psychiatry , communication , physics , quantum mechanics
Terror management theory assumes that death arouses existential anxiety in humans which is suppressed in focal attention. Whereas most studies provide indirect evidence for negative affect under mortality salience by showing cultural worldview defenses and self‐esteem strivings, there is only little direct evidence for implicit negative affect under mortality salience. In the present study, we assume that this implicit affective reaction towards death depends on people's ability to self‐regulate negative affect as assessed by the personality dimension of action versus state orientation. Consistent with our expectations, action‐oriented participants judged artificial words to express less negative affect under mortality salience compared to control conditions whereas state‐oriented participants showed the reversed pattern.