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Mortality salience impairs self-referential processing: Neurophysiological and behavioral evidence

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Abstract

Although recent research has suggested that reminders of mortality may increase behaviors and cognitions associated with escaping the self, this notion has not been directly tested. The current work provides evidence that mortality salience (MS) decreases the brain activity in response to the encoding of self-referential memory (Experiment 1) and impairs subsequent retrieval of self-referential memory (Experiment 2). Experiment 1 (N = 39) used event-related potentials to examine participants’ brain response while they performed trait judgments about the self and a celebrity, after they were primed with either MS or death-irrelevant negative affect (NA). Relative to NA, MS priming significantly attenuated an early frontal positivity at 180–300 ms in response to self- vs. celebrity-referential encoding. In Experiment 2 (N = 177), MS- and NA-primed participants performed the above trait judgment tasks and then completed a recognition test for the previously presented trait adjectives. Relative to NA priming, MS priming impaired recognition of trait adjectives that were associated with the self but not the celebrity. Overall, our findings suggest impaired self-referential processing, or ‘escaping’ the self, as a coping strategy for mortality concerns.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31671123), Humanity and Social Science foundation of Ministry of Education of China (15XJC190002), Chongqing Research program of Basic Research and Frontier Technology (cstc2015jcyjBX0057) and the fundamental research funds for the central universities (SWU1709224) to J. Y, and the Ministry of Education of China (Project 20130001110049) to S.H.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Psychology, Southwest University, Chongqing, 400715, China

    Yu Chen, Yang Shen, Xinxin Zhang, Hao Li, Xiaofan Xu, Lili Guan & Juan Yang

  2. Key Laboratory of Cognition and Personality, Ministry of Education, Southwest University, Chongqing, 400715, China

    Yu Chen, Yang Shen, Xinxin Zhang, Hao Li, Xiaofan Xu, Lili Guan & Juan Yang

  3. Center for Studies of Addiction, Department of Psychiatry, University of Pennsylvania, Perelman School of Medicine, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Zhenhao Shi

  4. School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, PKU-IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Beijing Key Laboratory of Behavior and Mental Health, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China

    Shihui Han

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  1. Yu Chen
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Correspondence to Juan Yang.

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Chen, Y., Shen, Y., Shi, Z. et al. Mortality salience impairs self-referential processing: Neurophysiological and behavioral evidence. Curr Psychol 39, 782–792 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-019-00193-1

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