Existential function of babies: Babies as a buffer of death‐related anxiety

Abstract

The present study examined babies as death anxiety buffers with Chinese participants in three experiments. In Experiment 1, death-related thoughts increased college-aged participants' interest in human babies. In Experiment 2, images of newborn animals reduced the number of death-related thoughts recorded by college-aged participants. In Experiment 3, female factory workers who read news articles describing deaths of babies had pessimistic estimations of their own life expectancies. An explanation of these results is provided within a terror management theory framework, with a primary focus on how babies reinforce cultural worldviews and enhance self-esteem via the notion of symbolic immortality. Thus, the anxiety-buffering function of baby is subsumed under cultural worldviews validation and self-esteem enhancement.

The evolved psychological mechanisms of fertility motivation: hunting for causation in a sea of correlation

“…They also found that terminally ill hospital patients showed greater preferences for family members under 5 years (versus older family members) in comparison with a non-terminally ill patient group. Follow-up work by Zhou et al [41] showed that students instructed to think about death preferred pictures of young children and viewed them longer than pictures of adults or objects.…”

“…We found no examples of primes being used in traditional societies to study reproductive behaviour. We found that priming was used to investigate influences on sexual and non-sexual risk taking [43,53,54], mate choice [39,40,46,56], fertility intentions and interest in children [6,38,41,45,[57][58][59][60], and parental investment preferences [39,42,55]. Participants were primed through a variety of means, including: reading texts [40,45,46,54,56], word completion tasks ( [6,41], photos [43,46], thought experiments [42,57,59,60], memory essays [53,55] and preceding questions [38,39,58] (see § §5a,c-e, 6b,c,e,j-l,o,p).…”

“…However, using university populations may be considered valid when piloting new methods, examining assumed human universals, or predictions are independent of assumptions concerning the subject pool. Increasingly, experimental methods are being used with non-university populations [38][39][40][41], populations with specific and relevant experience [42,43], and with populations in developing countries [12,36]. These studies extend the application of experimental methods and have been somewhat successful in addressing the causal pathways that underlie human fertility.…”

“…In the literature reviewed here, primes were embedded within traditional surveys, used in online/computer-based surveys, and in-person interviews with university populations [43,45,46,[53][54][55][56], and with the general public in developed and developing countries [6,[38][39][40][41][42][43][57][58][59][60]. We found no examples of primes being used in traditional societies to study reproductive behaviour.…”

“…This is supported by a growing body of research, using experimental methods, that suggests encouraging people to think about death increases childbearing motivation. This evidence comes mostly from psychological experiments inspired by terror-management theory [6,41,42,60] and life-history theory [45,46,50,52,54,56,63].…”