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Emotion as a necessary component of threat-induced death thought accessibility and defensive compensation

Motivation and Emotion volume 39, pages 142–155 (2015)Cite this article

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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Fig. 1

Notes

  1. Participants in both misattribution studies were excluded from analyses for not believing the cover story (7 participants in each Study 1 and 2). For instance, these participants did not believe that the beverage contained caffeine. As the entire misattribution paradigm hinges on participants believing this instruction, it was necessary to exclude these participants.

  2. The equality of variance assumption was violated for the post-image ratings of emotions. These ratings were thus transformed by taking the inverse (1/X). All subsequent inferential analyses utilize these transformed variables, but descriptive statistics (Ms, SDs, etc.) are reported using the untransformed variables.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Maryland, 1147 Biology/Psychology Building, College Park, MD, 20742, USA

    David Webber

  2. Department of Psychology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada

    Jeff Schimel & Erik H. Faucher

  3. Department of Psychology, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Joseph Hayes & Rui Zhang

  4. Department of Psychology, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand

    Andy Martens

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  1. David Webber
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  2. Jeff Schimel
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  3. Erik H. Faucher
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  4. Joseph Hayes
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Correspondence to David Webber.

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Webber, D., Schimel, J., Faucher, E.H. et al. Emotion as a necessary component of threat-induced death thought accessibility and defensive compensation. Motiv Emot 39, 142–155 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-014-9426-1

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Keywords

  • Terror management theory
  • Aversive arousal
  • Disgust
  • Misattribution
  • Reappraisal