Abstract
Terror Management Theory (TMT) suggests that death-related thoughts activate proximal defense which allows people to suppress or rationalize death awareness. So far there is no direct evidence to support the emotional response in the proximal defense process. The current research aimed to address this issue by examining behavioral (e.g., accuracy and reaction time) and neural responses (e.g., P1 and N400 amplitude) related to emotional arousal following death-related thoughts during proximal defense. Before engaged in emotional words (e.g., anxiety, fear and neutral) judgment task, participants answered questions that referred to emotional and physical changes about death to induce mortality salience (MS). In the control condition, participants received similar instructions concerning the experience of watching TV. Behavioral results showed that longer reaction time of words was seen in control group than MS group. The ERPs results showed that after reminders of death-related thoughts, in condition of MS, fear words elicited larger P1 ERP amplitudes, while the control group did not have this effect, which might reflect that emotional words caused different early attention patterns between MS group and control group. Moreover, compared with control group, larger N400 ERP amplitudes were elicited in condition of MS, suggesting larger cognitive inhibition of words processing caused by emotional reaction. The above results indicate that the early stages after mortality salience will induce fear and anxiety, but soon these negative emotions are suppressed and are at a lower level of accessibility. This result provides electrophysiological evidence for the proximal defense hypothesis of terror management theory.
Highlights
All the people have limited lifetime and have to face inevitable death
The Group × Word category interaction was not found (F (2,102) = .03, p = .97, 1-β = .11, f = .05, η2p = .002). These results suggested that mortality salience (MS) manipulation and word categories did not affect participants’ access to meaning of words
These results suggested that reaction time to words in control group were longer than MS group
Summary
All the people have limited lifetime and have to face inevitable death. In general, the inevitability of death does not lead one to live cautiously or have a more negative impact in life. Terror Management Theory is one of the most influential theories related to death in recent years, it provides a theoretical basis for people to understand the impact of death information on human behavior motivation and psychology [1]. Terror management theory believes that some psychological defense mechanisms help us alleviate the fear and anxiety caused by death-. Emotional mortality salience behavioral ERPs related thoughts. Beyond physical efforts to reduce death concerns, human beings have developed and relied on psychological buffers against fear about death [2, 3]. The thoughts that death is inevitable will affects people’s emotion, cognition and behavior [4]. The current study aims to answer whether emotional responses are involved and what emotions (e.g., anxiety or fear) can be aroused in terror management process by providing behavioral and neural evidence
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