Abstract
Terror management theory presents an account of how the avoidance of the potential anxiety accompanying knowledge of one’s inevitable mortality motivates a vast array of human behaviors. However, in practice, evidence from one of the hypotheses designed to test this account—the death thought accessibility (DTA) hypothesis—has been purely cognitive. The goal of the present research was to examine the role of emotion in this process. Participants were presented with existentially threatening stimuli under experimental situations in which the emotion induced by the threat (either aversive arousal or disgust) was present or absent. When the emotion was unaltered, participants exposed to threats, relative to controls, evinced high levels of DTA (Studies 1 and 3) and worldview defense (Study 2). When the emotion was misattributed to a neutral source (Studies 1–2) or down regulated via reappraisal (Study 3), however, DTA and worldview defense did not increase. The results and implications are discussed in relation to the threat compensation literature.
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