Event Title
Fear in the Face of Death: Mortality Salience and its Effect on Fearful Emotional Reactions
Faculty Mentor
Whitney Heppner
Keywords
Whitney Heppner
Abstract
This research seeks to further Terror Management Theory (Burke, Martens, & Faucher, 2010), and to question a basic assumption behind this theory – that thoughts of death cause a fear-response in people. Although decades of research support many tenets of Terror Management Theory, research on the underlying emotional mechanisms and responses is sparse. To measure emotional response to death-related stimuli, this project will use a widely established mortality salience manipulation where participants will be asked to write a passage either about what happens to them after death, or about a trip to the dentist. They will then perform a Lexical Decision Task, measuring response times in the decision of “word” or “non-word” for emotion-related or neutral words. It is expected that individuals who have previously written about their own death will respond more quickly to fear-related than sadness-related or neutral words, suggesting fear-priming in mortality salience manipulations.
Session Name:
Life After Death: Disco, Ascension, and Zombies
Start Date
4-4-2014 10:15 AM
End Date
4-4-2014 11:15 AM
Location
HSB 202
Fear in the Face of Death: Mortality Salience and its Effect on Fearful Emotional Reactions
HSB 202
This research seeks to further Terror Management Theory (Burke, Martens, & Faucher, 2010), and to question a basic assumption behind this theory – that thoughts of death cause a fear-response in people. Although decades of research support many tenets of Terror Management Theory, research on the underlying emotional mechanisms and responses is sparse. To measure emotional response to death-related stimuli, this project will use a widely established mortality salience manipulation where participants will be asked to write a passage either about what happens to them after death, or about a trip to the dentist. They will then perform a Lexical Decision Task, measuring response times in the decision of “word” or “non-word” for emotion-related or neutral words. It is expected that individuals who have previously written about their own death will respond more quickly to fear-related than sadness-related or neutral words, suggesting fear-priming in mortality salience manipulations.