Terror management and cognitive-experiential self-theory: Evidence that terror management occurs in the experiential system.

Abstract

The authors hypothesized, on the basis of terror management theory and cognitive-experiential self-theory, that participants in an experiential mode of thinking would respond to mortality salience with increased worldview defense and increased accessibility of death-related thoughts, whereas participants in a rational mode would not. Results from 3 studies provided convergent evidence that when participants were in an experiential mode, mortality salience produced the typical worldview defense effect, but when participants were in a rational mode it did not. Study 4 revealed that mortality salience also led to a delayed increase in the accessibility of death-related thoughts only when participants were in an experiential mode. These results supported the notion that worldview defense is intensified only if individuals are in an experiential mode when considering their mortality. Discussion focuses on implications for understanding terror management processes.

The effects of rational and experiential information processing of expert testimony in death penalty cases

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Deliver us from Evil: The Effects of Mortality Salience and Reminders of 9/11 on Support for President George W. Bush

“…Then, in Study 3, we determined if reminders of 9/11 function like MS primes in increasing support for President Bush. STUDY 2 Support for the dual process model has been obtained from studies showing that MS inductions that completely by-pass the conscious consideration of death can influence symbolic defenses (Arndt, Greenberg, Pyszczynski, & Solomon, 1997). More specifically, Arndt et al demonstrated that presenting death-related words beneath conscious awareness led to an immediate increase in death-thought accessibility relative to neutral or negative control words.…”

Impulse and Constraint: Perspectives From Personality Psychology, Convergence With Theory in Other Areas, and Potential for Integration

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