Symbolic Immortality Research Articles

Autonomy, Meaning, and the Mediating Role of Symbolic Immortality

The present work built on self-determination theory, terror management theory, and related existential and humanistic perspectives to test the mediating role of symbolic immortality in the association between autonomy and meaning in life. In two samples (Sample 1, n = 1,414; Sample 2, n = 882), autonomy was significantly associated with symbolic immortality, which in turn was significantly associated with meaning in life. Moreover, in both samples, multiple regression analyses supported the view that autonomy is a unique and significant predictor of symbolic immortality, and the proposed indirect effect remained significant after controlling for self-esteem. These results extend prior work addressing autonomy and meaning in life and point to interesting empirical directions for further understanding the existential role of autonomy in managing death-related concerns.

Supplemental Material for Long Live A(me)rica! An Examination of the Interplay Between Nationalistic–Symbolic Immortality Striving and Belief in Life After Death

Supplemental Material for Long Live A(me)rica! An Examination of the Interplay Between Nationalistic–Symbolic Immortality Striving and Belief in Life After Death

Testing the Effectiveness of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in Relieving Nurses' Ageism Toward Older Adults: A Randomized Controlled Trial.

BackgroundAlthough cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) techniques are well known for targeting psychological distresses, to date, no study has investigated their effectiveness in relieving death anxiety and ageism among nurses.MethodsA parallel randomized controlled trial was conducted according to the CONSORT guidelines during October 2019 at the university hospital. A total of 110 nurses were selected through proportional stratified sampling and randomly assigned to the experimental and control groups. The intervention consisted of six two-hour training sessions delivered over five modules with the integration of different CBT exercises. The effect of CBT was assessed by measuring the differences in the students’ responses to a series of validated questionnaires of study variables pre-test (before the training sessions) and post-test (after the training sessions). Clinical registration was completed at ClinicalTrial.gov (ID: NCT04319393).ResultsOverall, using CBT techniques led to significant improvements in the study outcomes. At postintervention, the nurses who had received CBT training had significantly better self-esteem and interpersonal relationships, a greater sense of symbolic immortality, and less death anxiety and ageism than the nurses in the control group.ConclusionsCBT is an effective evidence-based psychological intervention for relieving nurses’ ageism towards older adults. The psychological well-being of nurses caring for older adults is crucial, and new techniques should be adopted to relieve nurses’ accumulated stress and decrease their death anxiety. Future studies which investigate the effectiveness of CBT on other forms of discrimination, such as racism and sexism in healthcare settings, are recommended.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1007/s10608-020-10167-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Social curiosity as a way to overcome death anxiety: perspective of terror management theory

Social curiosity has been found to have great benefits in human life, especially in fostering interpersonal relationships. Nevertheless there is indication of other benefit of social curiosity that have not yet been explored, namely overcoming the anxiety of death. This indication is based on previous research which found a positive relationship between anxiety and social curiosity. In this study, social curiosity is framed as representation of symbolic immortality, which people use to overcome the terror of death. To support this conjecture, two studies were conducted using the Terror Management Theory (TMT) framework. Study 1 (N = 352, M age = 19.39) found a positive relationship between death anxiety and social curiosity. In Study 2 (N = 507, M age = 20.68) it was found that intolerance of uncertainty and desire for self-verification mediated the relationship between death anxiety and social curiosity. The results of this study indicate that increasing interest in obtaining information about how other people think, feel, or act is a form of mechanism used by people to control anxiety related to death.

Introduction: Peace and English Studies

Introduction: Peace and English Studies Lauren DiPaula (bio) and Tammy Winner (bio) What kind of education will teach the young to hate war? --Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, (23) Peace is hard work. It is not free. It requires justice, and blood, and determination. It requires love that mostly does not give back. Peace requires fearlessness in the face of conflict. It takes risk. It is sometimes a reckoning with ourselves, when we least want to see who we are. It takes self-reflection, advocacy, and action. We wanted this special issue of The CEA Critic to be a peaceable re-seeing of our study of literature, creative writing, rhetoric, composition, and pedagogy. The essays in this collection offer diverse voices telling us that a re-seeing of ourselves and our discipline is not easy or free or necessarily bloodless. Within our discipline in particular, it is hard work, as literacy education advocate and author, Mary Rose O’Reilley reminds us in her 1984 College English article, “The Peaceable Classroom” and her 1993 book by the same name. O’Reilley searches for a way to make the classroom a peaceable place in an attempt to answer a question that was posed to her, “I wonder if it is possible to teach literature in such a way that people stop killing each other?” (109). O’Reilley’s classroom becomes peaceable in her choice of content, but also in that she respects her students, their agency, and the differences they bring to the subject. As co-editors, we come to our topic seeking different answers: Tammy in search of new ways to help her students become better writers without “bleeding” all over their papers with a red pen, and Lauren in search of ways to better attend to the community of the classroom so that students leave prepared to confront conflict productively. Together, though, we wanted to extend the idea of peaceable to the field, to see how it manifests itself today across the diverse population such as we are. Much like us, the contributors in this issue take different approaches to the study of peace. They analyze, they muse, they argue, they narrate, and they reflect. But they also come together: from new understandings of composition and rhetoric based in social justice, to a musing on the rhetoric of the war story, to a call for more voices to be heard, these essays emphasize that peace, social justice, and grappling with words are all inextricably linked. Artist Sunni Zemblowski’s cover design begins the collection, and it encourages us to meditate on the language and semiotics of peace. [End Page 95] The cover contains three peace symbols against a backdrop of patterns of plants associated with peace: Olive branches, poppies, lavender, and meadowsweet. Zemblowski’s use of these plants further reminds us that the language of peace is more than words, and even more than symbols. It involves all of our senses--the smell of lavender, for instance--and associations--meadowsweet, for instance, was used for weddings and poppies, which represented peace following World War I. In an effort to support our re-seeing of peace, Mary Rose O’Reilley contributed her voice to this issue with two poems, with which we have bookended the issue. The first, “From the Island,” was inspired by the view out of her kitchen window in the midst of the Covid-19 outbreak. O’Reilley’s poem reminds us that we can choose to see the good in every situation--even in a war against an enemy we cannot see or hear. The last poem, “Renga,” invites us to return home in a sense, to be a witness to nature and love (while keeping a safe distance). Bernard A. Miller’s essay “Composition, Decomposition, and the Rhetoric of the War Story” is a poetic and graphic musing on not just the war story but words themselves. He demonstrates how those fighting in war struggle to find meaning in words despite war’s processes of evil, meaninglessness, and decomposition. At the same time, some soldiers and veterans face an absence of meaning in the only thing that can bring about symbolic immortality, composition. This speechlessness compounds the...

Bequest Provision Preferences in Commercial Annuities: An Experimental Test of the Role of Mortality Salience

Recent research demonstrates that personal mortality salience from annuity contemplation generates an avoidance response, reducing interest in purchasing annuities. However, theoretical models of mortality salience also predict an increased desire for investment in the future circumstances of surviving others (“symbolic immortality”), such as that provided by bequest provisions in an annuity contract. An experimental test confirms that those exposed to higher levels of personal mortality reminders exhibit a greater preference for an annuity paying lower income but with a bequest provision. Thus, the effects of mortality salience can drive annuity decisions, not only at the extensive margin (avoidance of any purchase), but also at the intensive margin (purchasing lower income by including a bequest provision).

Mortality Salience and Age Effects on Charitable Donations

Research suggests that people are typically more generous in later life. Terror management theory offers one explanation for this pattern. The theory suggests that humans’ innate desire to survive results in strong reactions to increased awareness of mortality, thereby affecting behaviors. Older adults’ increasing proximity to life’s end has been associated with greater generative concern, as a means of caring for future generations and ensuring symbolic immortality. This experimental study evaluated the effects of age and mortality salience on charitable giving. Age and mortality salience interacted to affect donations overall and specifically for in-group and out-group donations. Compared with respective age-based control groups, findings indicate that mortality salience primes led young adults to donate less overall to the in-group, and older adults to donate more overall and more to the out-group. Middle-aged adults’ donations did not vary according to priming condition. Results suggest that contemplation of mortality differentially affects charitable donations of young and older adults.

Prosocial Attitudes toward Money from Terror Management Perspective: Death Transcendence through Spirituality

ABSTRACTBased on Terror Management Theory (TMT), we suggest that spirituality and prosocial attitudes toward money have a similar defensive function in resisting existential anxiety. In mortality salient (MS) situations, both spirituality and prosocial money attitudes afford symbolic immortality by self-transcendent connections. In four studies, we found that activating death awareness weakened people’s subjective love of money (Study 1) and predicted increased spending willingness on prosocial rather than proself goals (Studies 2, 3, and 4). More importantly, MS effects on money attitudes were smaller when people’s trait spirituality was high (vs. low; Studies 1, 2, 3) and when people were primed to experience spirituality (vs. happiness control condition; Study 4). For low spirituality people, the association between MS and prosocial spending also depended on the capacity of money spending to contribute positively to one’s feelings of self-worth (Study 3). Theoretical implications and future directions are discussed.

Finding Meaning With Creativity in the Past, Present, and Future

Being creative is considered a desirable trait, yet most empirical studies emphasize how to increase creativity rather than explore its possible benefits. A natural connection is how creativity can enhance life’s meaning. Many of the core concepts in work on the meaning of life, such as the needs for coherence, significance, and purpose or the desire for symbolic immortality, can be reached through creative activity. The synthesis of these two constructs—creativity and the meaning of life—is discussed with a temporal model encompassing past, present, and future pathways to creativity. The past pathway can help one understand and reflect on life. The present pathway can remind one of life’s joy and the many possible connections with humanity. Finally, the future pathway strives to ensure some type of legacy that may resonate with younger generations.

Responsibility Beyond the Grave: Technological Mediation of Collective Moral Agency in Online Commemorative Environments

Online platforms of donations in memoriam are technologies of commemoration that mediate a responsible mode of being in the world. They construct death as empowering for the deceased, and they open up new opportunities for collaborative action to emerge. By relying on existing conceptualizations of post-mortem personhood and technologically mediated agency, this article considers the socio-technical construction of the commemorative platform, MuchLoved, an online tribute charity; it focuses on its interaction design for online donations in memoriam. Through specific design options, MuchLoved stirs a distinctive form of distributed agency with a collective and moral character. This accomplishment of collective moral agency through technological mediations might redefine the space of symbolic immortality and change the human condition in relation with death.

Encounters with offspring help terminally ill adult patients cope with death anxiety

ABSTRACTThis overview of recent work drawing on the theories of terror management and symbolic immortality suggests practical ways of helping the terminally ill to cope with death anxiety and its potential effects. The literature review shows that parenthood can act as an anxiety buffer mechanism against the fear of death but that individual differences, including attachment avoidance, moderate this association. Encounters with adult patients’ offspring may help minimize fear of death, improve coping, and increase quality of life and emotional well-being. Practical suggestions for psychologists, social workers and physicians are presented.

Immortality transformed: mind cloning, transhumanism and the quest for digital immortality

This article explores the transhumanist effort to achieve digital immortality through the technology of mind cloning. Drawing upon the writings of Martine Rothblatt, one of the leading proponents of the Transhumanist Movement in the United States, it asks: how is this effort both similar to and different from other attempts our species has made to achieve ‘symbolic immortality’? Can Lifton and Olson’s concept of symbolic immortality adequately account for the transhumanist attempt to live forever in digital form? Or, is this effort predicated upon very different ontologies and conceptions of what it means to be human? By placing the transhumanist quest for digital immortality within a comparative perspective, this article hopes to enrich our understanding of the transhumanist project and develop a better sense for how it is reproducing and reconfiguring the way human beings deal with enduring existential dilemmas. The article concludes by considering how the transhumanist attempt to achieve digital immortality articulates with Bauman’s discussion of modern and postmodern ‘life strategies’ for ameliorating death anxiety. Whereas Bauman proposed that modern strategies involve ‘deconstructing mortality’, and postmodern strategies involve ‘deconstructing immortality’, I argue that the transhumanist strategy is better conceptualised as a quasi-modern attempt to reconstruct immortality through technological means.

Testing the causal relationship between religious belief and death anxiety

ABSTRACTReligion has long been speculated to function as a strategy to ameliorate our fear of death. Terror management theory provides two possible causal pathways through which religious beliefs can fulfil this function. According to the “worldview defence” account of terror management, worldviews reduce death anxiety by offering symbolic immortality: on this view, only people who accept the religious worldview in question should benefit from religious beliefs. Alternatively, religious worldviews also offer literal immortality, and may do so independently of individuals’ worldviews. Both strands of thought appear in the terror management theory literature. In this paper, we attempt to resolve this issue experimentally by manipulating religious belief and measuring explicit (Study 1) and implicit (Study 2) death anxiety. In Study 1, we found that the effect of religious belief on explicit death anxiety depends critically on participants’ own religious worldviews, such that believers and non-believers reported greater death anxiety when their worldview is threatened. In Study 2, however, we find that religious belief alleviates implicit death anxiety amongst both believers and non-believers. These findings suggest that religious beliefs can alleviate death anxiety at two different levels, by offering symbolic and literal immortality, respectively.

An Introduction to Global Family Therapy: Examining the Empirical Evidence of Terror Management Theory Within the Family and Social System

ABSTRACTTerror Management Theory (TMT) endorses that individuals manage fears of mortality by establishing a coherent cultural worldview and earning self-esteem by meeting cultural worldview standards. Global Family Therapy (GFT) examines these constructs within family and social systems. Aims of GFT include the development of a culturally-fluid worldview that earns self-esteem across various resources. Barriers to this process include GFT's concepts of systemic cultural worldview discrepancies, systemic disproportions of resources for self-esteem, and symbolic immortality's multigenerational process. By emphasizing the role of cultural worldviews, GFT expands the concept of culture from being a component of family therapy to being the emphasis of family therapy.

Can Creativity Beat Death? A Review and Evidence on the Existential Anxiety Buffering Functions of Creative Achievement

AbstractThe relationship between creativity and symbolic immortality had been long acknowledged by scholars. In a review of the literature, we found 12 papers that empirically examined the relationship between creativity and mortality awareness using a Terror Management Theory paradigm, overall supporting the notion that creativity plays an important role in the management of existential concerns. Also, a mini meta‐analysis of the impact of death awareness on creativity resulted in a small‐medium weighted mean effect. We examined the existential anxiety buffering functions of creative achievement as assessed by the Creative Achievement Questionnaire in a sample of 108 students. It was found that at high, but not low, levels of creative goals, creative achievement was associated with lower death‐thought accessibility under mortality salience in comparison to controls. To our knowledge, this is the first empirical report of the anxiety buffering functions of creative achievement among people for whom creativity constitutes a central part of their cultural worldview. The current findings support the notion that creative achievement may be an avenue for symbolic immortality, particularly among individuals who value creativity. Implications for understanding death‐related creativity motivations and their impact on individuals and society and for the promotion of creative achievement and creative motivation are discussed.

Activism as a heroic quest for symbolic immortality: An existential perspective on collective action

Excellent research exists on the conditions that generate political and social activism. Yet a central issue has remained perplexing: how does the personal need to stand out as unique and heroic interact with the concern for the positive image of the group, and the desire to protect and bolster its status, goals and shared values, in propelling collective action? Inspired by existential theory and research, this paper proposes an existential perspective on activism that identifies the human desire for a sense of meaning and significance as an important motivation underlying individuals' choice to engage in collective action. This study outlines an integrative model of collective action, combining insights from existential psychology with insights from the social identity perspective, to bridge together needs and concerns associated with both personal identity and group identity into a single model of collective action through the concept of death-anxiety buffering mechanisms. This model suggests that collective action is an effective means to satisfy existential needs through bolstering and protecting group interests and values on the one hand, and realizing the activist's heroism project on the other. Suggestions for future research are discussed.

Life after death: evidence of the Hoover Dam as a hero project that defends against mortality reminders

Dams have historically been constructed as a supply management strategy to control water despite increasingly recognized sociocultural, environmental and financial costs. Current water management strategies continue to depend on technology-based solutions despite these costs. We used a transdisciplinary approach to link water history and social psychology to examine the underlying influences on water decisions such as the construction of large-scale water infrastructure. Specifically, we used indicators from terror management theory—a social psychology framework to understand how humans’ efforts to repress their death awareness influences motivation and behaviour. We focus on symbolic immortality as a powerful way by which people overcome their death fears in a highly individualistic Western and secular society. In this research three interrelated questions. First, was there evidence of mortality salience indicators in discussions of the Hoover Dam? Using the Hoover Dam as a historic case, we identified mortality salience evidence in the public statements during the dam’s pre-construction, construction, and post-construction phases. We found abundant mortality salience in the public statements about the Hoover Dam during all phases. Second, could the Hoover Dam be classified as a legacy project or “hero project” as defined by Ernest Becker and subsequent research through terror management theory? The evidence suggested that the Hoover Dam—as a representative example of the large scale, water infrastructure that dominates our contemporary supply-management regime—might have served as a hero project for those involved in its installation. And third, could the Hoover Dam, and possibly other large dams, be a means to overcompensate for mortality-fears for those involved in their installations, contributing to an environmentally unsustainable but historical water management legacy? Characterising the Hoover dam as not only a water supply infrastructure project but also as a hero project intended to alleviate mortality-fears, offers complementary explanations as to why unsustainable water management decisions were made in the American West.

It's the End of the World and I Feel Fine: Soul Belief and Perceptions of End-of-the-World Scenarios.

Five studies tested the effects that soul beliefs have on reactions to end-of-the-world scenarios. In Studies 1 and 2, participants who firmly believe in an immortal soul showed less resistance to an article predicting the end of humanity than those without such belief. However, in Studies 3 to 5, thoughts of symbolic immortality made soul believers more resistant to scientific evidence predicting the end of humanity. These results suggest that belief in an immortal soul provides psychological protection against the threat of humanity's demise that does not hold for symbolic immortality beliefs.

Posthumous personhood and the affordances of digital media

This article identifies and outlines some of the more prominent ways that digital media can extend one’s personhood following death. We consider three examples: when the digital persona of the deceased continues to interact with the living through a human surrogate; the emergence of autonomous and semi-autonomous software enabling the dead to use social media to intervene in current events; and finally the operation of algorithmic presence services like Eterni.me, where artificial intelligence creates a re-enlivened form of the deceased. Situating these examples in relation to sociological, anthropological and cultural literature foundational to ideas of distributed personhood and posthumous symbolic immortality, we suggest that digital codes and computational texts stand as key sites for contemporary forms of ‘distributed personhood’, including posthumous personhood. We then extend this body of literature by examining how the discursive politics of social media contributes to a social and commercial context, which supports ongoing interactions with the dead online. Through this process, we suggest that the persona of the dead, which remains after bodily death, can continue to maintain meaningful posthumous relationships with the living, presenting a new perspective on how we interact with the dead through digital media.

From monuments to megapixels: Death, memory, and symbolic immortality in the contemporary United States

This article explores transformations in the American way of death from the Victorian period to the present. It asks: What do recent shifts in mortuary practice and memorialization reveal about larger changes in American culture and society? And what is at stake in charting and understanding these changes for anthropologists interested in technology and culture change more generally? We argue that the move away from the lavish Victorian funeral to cheaper, less traditional ways of caring for the dead is productively conceptualized as a shift in differing memorial paradigms. In the case at hand, we characterize this paradigm shift as one from ‘monuments’ to ‘megapixels’, the former being ascendant at the beginning of the era of film photography and the latter becoming ascendant with the rise of social and digital media. We trace the development and central features of these two memorial paradigms, showing how the rise of film photography played a central role in facilitating the transition between them, and we explore how these memorial paradigms have provided Americans with alternative ways of combatting death anxiety since the 19th century. Ultimately, we argue that today’s virtual memorials and online cemeteries have arisen to provide a growing number of Americans with a sense of symbolic immortality that has become increasingly difficult to realize by more traditional means. However, we also consider how these new means of digital memorialization might be altering the memorial landscape in new ways and changing how the bereaved cope with object loss.