Death demystified: A linguistic coding analysis of the mortality salience manipulation

Eadeh, Fade R.; Peak, Stephanie Allison; Slochower, John; Lambert, Alan J.

doi:10.1037/e578192014-458

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“…We have already shown how this approach can be useful in terms of providing converging evidence with respect to the affective consequences of the task, but there are a host of other issues that remain to be studied using this approach. Recent work in our laboratory (Eadeh, Peak, Slochower, & Lambert, 2014) suggests that for many (but not all) participants, the MS task essentially represents an explicit prime of religious/quasi-religious views, and the degree to which the protocols contain such manifest content is strongly predictive of posttask shifts in certain types of conservative ideology. These and other lines of future research should be instrumental in affording greater insight into what we consider to be one of the more intriguing and noteworthy manipulations in the history of experimental social psychology.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Toward a greater understanding of the emotional dynamics of the mortality salience manipulation: Revisiting the “affect-free” claim of terror management research.

Lambert¹,

Eadeh²,

Peak³

et al. 2014

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

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130

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The experimental manipulation of mortality salience (MS) represents one of the most widely used methodological procedures in social psychology, having been employed by terror management researchers in hundreds of studies over the last 20 years. One of the more provocative conclusions regarding this task is that it does not produce any reliable changes in self-reported affect, a view that we refer to as the affect-free claim. After reviewing 336 published studies that used the standard version of the MS task, we suggest that the evidence on which this claim is based may be less definitive than is commonly supposed. Moreover, we propose that the MS manipulation can, in fact, produce significant and meaningful changes in affect once one employs the appropriate measures and experimental design. In support of this position, we report 4 experiments, each of which demonstrates reliable activation of negative affect, especially with respect to fear-/terror-related sentiments. We discuss the implications of our findings for terror management theory as well as for research and theory on the measurement of mood and emotion.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%