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More than words: Contemplating death enhances positive emotional word use
Abstract
Four experiments, three cross-sectional and one longitudinal, tested the hypothesis that contemplating one’s own death produces a shift toward the use of positive emotion words. Participants who wrote about their own death, compared with those who wrote about dental pain, uncertainty, and meaningless, used more positive emotions words in their narratives (Experiments 1a and 1b). Experiment 2 found that contemplating one’s own death enhanced positive emotional word use across different mortality salience manipulations and remained consistent over the course of a 6-day study. Experiment 3 showed that the more positive emotion words participants used when contemplating their mortality, the greater worldview defense they showed. These results suggest that word use offers insight into how the mind responds to the salience of mortality.
... thinking about dental pain) activated a non-conscious emotional coping response that was counterintuitive to the overt emotional distress one might expect, such that participants completed ambiguous word stems with relatively more positive emotion words and favored positive emotional associations in judgments of word similarity. Also, findings by Kashdan et al. (2014) indicated that such a shift toward the use of positive emotion words may be involved in regulating the fear of death: writings of individuals contemplating death (vs. people thinking about dental pain, uncertainty, or meaninglessness) showed an increased use of positive emotional language. ...
... We hypothesized that if tuning in to emotional positivity acts as a psychological mechanism aimed at coping with the threat of mortality (DeWall and Baumeister, 2007;Kashdan et al., 2014), it would be reflected in the emotional word use in death row inmates' final statements such that death row inmates would use a higher proportion of positive than negative emotion words. We further hypothesized that the immense existential threat that real-life executions evoke would lead to a higher proportion of positive emotion words compared with word usage base rates (Pennebaker et al., 2007b) as well as compared with the words of individuals contemplating death (Kashdan et al., 2014) or individuals attempting or committing suicide (Handelman and Lester, 2007). ...
... We hypothesized that if tuning in to emotional positivity acts as a psychological mechanism aimed at coping with the threat of mortality (DeWall and Baumeister, 2007;Kashdan et al., 2014), it would be reflected in the emotional word use in death row inmates' final statements such that death row inmates would use a higher proportion of positive than negative emotion words. We further hypothesized that the immense existential threat that real-life executions evoke would lead to a higher proportion of positive emotion words compared with word usage base rates (Pennebaker et al., 2007b) as well as compared with the words of individuals contemplating death (Kashdan et al., 2014) or individuals attempting or committing suicide (Handelman and Lester, 2007). Drawing on postulations by SST , we further aimed to explore the relations between positive emotional word use and language indicative of self-references, social orientation, cognitive processing, time orientation, and personal concerns with religion and death. ...
How do individuals emotionally cope with the imminent real-world salience of mortality? DeWall and Baumeister as well as Kashdan and colleagues previously provided support that an increased use of positive emotion words serves as a way to protect and defend against mortality salience of one’s own contemplated death. Although these studies provide important insights into the psychological dynamics of mortality salience, it remains an open question how individuals cope with the immense threat of mortality prior to their imminent actual death. In the present research, we therefore analyzed positivity in the final words spoken immediately before execution by 407 death row inmates in Texas. By using computerized quantitative text analysis as an objective measure of emotional language use, our results showed that the final words contained a significantly higher proportion of positive than negative emotion words. This emotional positivity was significantly higher than (a) positive emotion word usage base rates in spoken and written materials and (b) positive emotional language use with regard to contemplated death and attempted or actual suicide. Additional analyses showed that emotional positivity in final statements was associated with a greater frequency of language use that was indicative of self-references, social orientation, and present-oriented time focus as well as with fewer instances of cognitive-processing, past-oriented, and death-related word use. Taken together, our findings offer new insights into how individuals cope with the imminent real-world salience of mortality.
... Similarly, comparing the last words of executed prisoners with people's general ideas about death and dying, we found that death row inmates' final statements contained a significantly larger proportion of words reflecting positive affect than the writings of people contemplating their own death (cf. Hirschmüller and Egloff, 2016, Table 3; Kashdan et al., 2014). ...
... Most of these studies have used death essay questions-asking participants to write about the emotions that thoughts of their own death arouse in them and what they think will happen to them as they physically die-and compared participants' answers with people's writings about non-death-related control topics (Burke et al., 2010). For example, Kashdan et al. (2014) found that the writings of people who had answered questions about their own death included more positive emotion words than control groups' writings about dental pain, uncertainty, or meaninglessness. Further studies have emphasized the role of effects of mortality salience on relational strivings and the relevance of close relationships (Mikulincer et al., 2003) and religious beliefs (Vail et al., 2010;Halberstadt and Jong, 2014). ...
Executions are one form of death that can be assumed to be maximally anxiety provoking. Words spoken by death row inmates moments before their execution can provide valuable insights into people's end-of-life communication needs and themes, conveying what individuals choose to express to others in the face of imminent death. In this focused review, we describe findings from quantitative and qualitative text analysis studies that have analyzed affective experiences and meaning-making attempts in transcriptions of actual statements made by Texas death row inmates. Overall, the most prevalent content themes identified in these final acts of verbal communication in the reviewed studies consisted of a strong predominance of emotional positivity, messages to relevant social others, and spiritual references. We subsequently view the reviewed findings in the light of additional research in which people's conceptions of death and dying were explored and language studies in which people's communication before other forms of death was analyzed. Finally, we describe open questions and directions for future analyses of death row inmates' final statements, and we outline practical implications.
... Other scholars on death studies have noted how the little conversations that occasionally arise surround one's own death (Kashdan et al., 2014) or other people's death (Nelson & Nelson, 1975) especially in the cases of terminally ill patients or the ageing. This does indicate a certain level of acceptance as people age or approach death. ...
... Furthermore, participants' MS might still be affected by the death-related measures in wave 1. However, there is no evidence for MS effects to last longer than one week (Kashdan et al., 2014). We rather assume that our results reflect an overestimation of the MS effect due to a publication bias over the past 30 years (Rodríguez-Ferreiro et al., 2019). ...
The present research aims to facilitate radical, intersectional psychosocial intervention in gender stereotypes. Queer terror management theory provides a theoretical framework for an effect of death attitudes on stereotypes about sex, gender and desire. An initial version of the theory assumed that death acceptance would inhibit the activation of gender stereotypes, depending on the moderating role of mortality salience. A quasi-experiment with Implicit Association Tests and explicit surveys was run to put the theory to an initial test. Results showed that a more positive death valence in wave 1 - not death acceptance or mortality salience - was associated with less implicit sexual identification, gender prejudice and homonegativity. Explicit results were not conclusive. Future research shall replicate the quasi-experiment and broaden its scope to further kinds of social prejudice.
... Indeed, 80% of the statements that they sampled contained more positive emotion words than negative ones. They also compared the statements with results from a study where participants were asked to contemplate their own death (Kashdan et al., 2014) as well as suicide notes preceding actual or attempted death (Handelman & Lester, 2007), and in both cases found that the statements contained a higher proportion of positive emotion words. ...
Over the past two decades, a growing body of work has emerged in the social sciences that explores various aspects of capital punishment in the contemporary United States. This article reviews one strand of this literature that focuses on the execution ritual itself – specifically on condemned inmates’ last meals and the final statements that they make in the execution chamber just prior to their execution. It also discusses some of the limitations of the research and offers some ideas for future scholarship in this area.
... Previous research within the TMT framework that has examined the effects of Mortality Salience (MS) on language use has shown that MS sometimes increases the use of language that reflects causation (Landau et al., 2009); it is associated with greater use of positive emotion words (Kashdan et al., 2014); and that MS boosts linguistic style mimicry with a conversation partner (Cox & Kersten, 2016). Importantly, whereas most research into TMT has examined mortality salience in laboratory contexts, the current work provides evidence that comes from a highly ecological setting. ...
What happens when entire populations are exposed to news of impending existential threats? In the current study, we address this question by investigating the association between existential threats and the certitude of societal discourse. According to appraisal theory, threats give rise to anxiety and perceptions of uncertainty; as such, it predicts that exposure to life-threatening events will increase expressions of uncertainty. An alternative possibility is that people will respond to threats by utilizing psychological compensation mechanisms that will give rise to greater expressions of certainty. Across two studies, we measured linguistic certainty in more than 3.2 million tweets, covering different psychological contexts: (i) the 15 major terrorist and school shooting events that took place between 2016 and 2018; (ii) the COVID-19 pandemic. Consistent with the idea of compensatory processing, the results show that levels of expressed certainty increased following intentional and natural existential threats. We discuss the implications of our findings to theories of psychological compensation and to our understanding of collective response in the age of global threats.
... Previous research within the TMT framework that has examined the effects of Mortality Salience (MS) on language use has shown that MS sometimes increases the use of language that reflects causation (Landau et al., 2009); it is associated with greater use of positive emotion words (Kashdan et al., 2014); and that MS boosts linguistic style mimicry with a conversation partner (Cox & Kersten, 2016). Importantly, whereas most research into TMT has examined mortality salience in laboratory contexts, the current work provides evidence that comes from a highly ecological setting. ...
What happens when entire populations are exposed to news of impending existential threats? In the current study, we address this question by investigating the association between existential threats and the certitude of societal discourse. According to appraisal theory, threats give rise to anxiety and perceptions of uncertainty; as such, it predicts that exposure to life-threatening events will increase expressions of uncertainty. An alternative possibility is that people will respond to threats by utilizing psychological compensation mechanisms that will give rise to greater expressions of certainty. Across two studies, we measured linguistic certainty in more than 3.2 million tweets, covering different psychological contexts: (i) the 15 major terrorist and school shooting events that took place between 2016-2018; (ii) the COVID-19 pandemic. Consistent with the idea of compensatory processing, the results show that levels of expressed certainty increased following intentional and natural existential threats. We discuss the implications of our findings to theories of psychological compensation and to our understanding of collective response in the age of global threats.
... However, these studies have limited generalizability to real-life experiences of death and omitted the role of death reflection (Cozzolino, 2006;Cozzolino et al., 2004). In contrast, the scarce research on death reflection, although considering both forms of death awareness, has only examined how death reflection differentially influences outcomes from death anxiety instead of how they operate together (e.g., Blackie & Cozzolino, 2011;Frias et al., 2011;Kashdan et al., 2014). ...
The COVID-19 pandemic—as an omnipresent mortality cue—heightens employees’ awareness of their mortality and vulnerability. Extant research has identified two distinct forms of death awareness: death anxiety and death reflection. Because researchers have exclusively examined death anxiety and death reflection as independent and unique variables across individuals while overlooking their interplay and co-existence within individuals, we know little about whether and why employees can have different combined experiences of two forms of death awareness over a certain period of time (e.g., during the pandemic), and how these different employee experiences relate to theoretically and practically important work-relevant consequences. To address this gap in our knowledge, we adopted a person-centered approach using latent profile analysis to consider death anxiety and death reflection conjointly within employees during the COVID-19 pandemic. Across two studies, we identified three distinct death awareness profiles—the disengaged, calm reflectors, and anxious reflectors—and found membership in these profiles systematically varied according to health- (e.g., risk of severe illness from COVID-19), work- (e.g., job-required human contact), and community-related (e.g., the number of regional infections) factors influencing the self-relevance of COVID-19 as a mortality cue. In addition, we found that these death awareness profiles differentially predicted important employee outcomes, including well-being (i.e., depression and emotional exhaustion) and prosocial behaviors at work (i.e., organizational citizenship behaviors and pro-diversity behavior).
... Evans, Walters and Hatch-Woodruff [29] asked undergraduates to write a narrative about their own hypothetical death or the death of another, and found writing about the death of another was associated with more realistic considerations of death (pain, negative emotions). A related series of experiments by Kashdan and colleagues [30] found that undergraduates asked to write a narrative about their own hypothetical death used more positive emotion words compared to those who wrote about dental pain, perhaps to direct attention away from the threat of their mortality. Concurring with this, linguistic analysis of blog posts by people with terminal illness showed less use of negative affect words and more positive affect words than seen in simulated blogs by non-patients imagining imminent death [16]. ...
Understanding public attitudes towards death is needed to inform health policies to foster community death awareness and preparedness. Linguistic sentiment analysis of how people describe their feelings about death can add to knowledge gained from traditional self-reports. This study provided the first description of emotive attitudes expressed towards death utilising textual sentiment analysis for the dimensions of valence, arousal and dominance. A linguistic lexicon of sentiment norms was applied to activities conducted in an online course for the general-public designed to generate discussion about death. We analysed the sentiment of words people chose to describe feelings about death, for themselves, for perceptions of the feelings of ‘others’, and for longitudinal changes over the time-period of exposure to a course about death (n = 1491). The results demonstrated that sadness pervades affective responses to death, and that inevitability, peace, and fear were also frequent reactions. However, words chosen to represent perceptions of others’ feelings towards death suggested that participants perceived others as feeling more negative about death than they do themselves. Analysis of valence, arousal and dominance dimensions of sentiment pre-to-post course participation demonstrated that participants chose significantly happier (more positive) valence words, less arousing (calmer) words, and more dominant (in-control) words to express their feelings about death by the course end. This suggests that the course may have been helpful in participants becoming more emotionally accepting in their feelings and attitude towards death. Furthermore, the change over time appeared greater for younger participants, who showed more increase in the dominance (power/control) and pleasantness (valence) in words chosen at course completion. Sentiment analysis of words to describe death usefully extended our understanding of community death attitudes and emotions. Future application of sentiment analysis to other related areas of health policy interest such as attitudes towards Advance Care Planning and palliative care may prove fruitful.
... The mean of 2.74 positive emotion words for each entry in Pennebaker and colleagues' (2015) dataset was statistically significantly lower than that of the prisoners' dataset average of 9.64 found in Hirschm€ uller and Egloff (2016) study. The death-row inmates, in fact, were even more positive than presumably comfortable college students asked to contemplate their own death and commit their thoughts to paper (Kashdan et al., 2014), and, not surprisingly, more positive than people who died by suicide and left notes (Handelman & Lester, 2007). ...
We consider here whether African-Americans executed on death row in Texas are consequently (a) more likely to have committed economically-motivated secondary crimes during the commission of homicide/attempted homicide, and whether these inmates were (b) less likely to express being sorry in their final statements before execution. Our study revealed support for the following hypothesized patterns: Caucasian offenders used a greater number of sorry-related words in their last statements, on average, compared with African-American offenders. In addition, homicides/attempted homicides committed by African-Americans were significantly more likely to have included a secondary economically-motivated crime (e.g., robbery). Subsequent analyses revealed that offender race significantly mediated the effects of economic secondary crime commission and “emotional intensity” on expressed sorrow in final statements.
... Therefore, people who are frequently involved in religious activities are more comfortable with death and more open to the hospice philosophy of care (Ellis & Wahab, 2013;Jonas & Fischer, 2006). Second, prior studies have focused on the beneficial health effects of mortality salience using a TMT framework (DeWall & Baumeister, 2007;Kashdan et al., 2014;Vail et al., 2012). Our findings provide evidence of the general premise of TMT that more exposure to the mortality salience addressing personal discomfort with death may reduce death anxiety, improve comfort with talking about death, and then have better attitude or better management of EOL care. ...
In end‐of‐life (EOL) care research, death anxiety and religiosity are often overlooked. Terror management theory (TMT) may provide a useful conceptual model with which to examine how comfort discussing death and religiosity influence attitudes related to EOL care. A telephone‐based survey was conducted among community‐dwelling adults in the Unites States. Via random sampling, with over‐sampling of Hispanics/African Americans, 123 completed survey interviews (response rate = 46%) were analyzed. Respondents were more likely to have better attitudes toward EOL care if they were older or white, religiously active, and comfortable with the subject of death. Religiosity and comfort discussing death were correlated with each other and remained significant predictors of attitudes about EOL care even without demographic covariates. Findings suggest that promoting an open dialogue about mortality may improve attitudes about EOL care and utilization of palliative care services. The study also provides evidence about the utility and applicability of TMT for EOL care.
... It is an extension of Neurominer, a text analysis tool based on Neurolinguistics that uses Text Mining and Psychometry techniques to identify and classify PRSs of individuals based on loaded texts [18] [19]. This classification process counts words of the message (sensory-words) also contained in a LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) dictionary, which stores the psychological characteristics (in our context, neurolinguistic profile or RS) of each sensory-word [20] [21]. ...
Empathy plays an important role in social interactions, for example, in effective teaching-learning processes, in teacher-student relationships, and in the company-client or employee-customer relationships, retaining potential partners and providing them with greater satisfaction. In parallel, the Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) support people in their interactions, especially when the interlocutors are geographically distant from one another. In CMC, there are several approaches to promote empathy in social or human- computer interactions. However, for this type of communication, a little explored mechanism to gain empathy is the use of the theory of Neurolinguistics that presents the possibility of developing a Preferred Representation System (PRS) for cognition in humans. In this context, this paper presents an experimental evaluation of the NeuroMessenger, a collaborative messenger library that uses Neurolinguistics, Psychometry and Text Mining to promote empathy among interlocutors, from the PRS identification and suggestion of textual matching. The results showed that the performance with the use of NeuroMessenger, in favor of empathy, was higher, as well as there was an evidence statistically significant of the difference between the distribution of grades in the empathy evaluation, in favor of NeuroMessenger. Despite the results are satisfactory, more research on textual matching to gain empathy is needed.
... Neurominer uses Text Mining and Psychometry techniques to identify and classify PRSs of individuals based on loaded texts [31,32]. This classification process is based on the counting of words contained in a LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) dictionary, which contains the psychological characteristics (in our context, neurolinguistic profile) of each term contained in it [33,34]. ...
Empathy plays an important role in social interactions, such an effective teaching-learning process in a teacher-student relationship, and company-client or employee-customer relationship to retain potential clients and provide them with greater satisfaction. Increasingly, the Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) support people in their interactions, especially when the interlocutors are geographically distant from one another. In CMC, there are different approaches to promote empathy in social or human-computer interactions. However, a little explored approach to gaining empathy in CMC is the use of the theory of Neurolinguistics that presents the possibility of developing a Preferred Representation System (PRS) for cognition in humans. This paper presents an initial experimental evaluation of the NeuroMessenger, a collaborative messenger library that uses the theory of Neurolinguistics to promote empathy by PRS identification and suggestion of textual matching based on the given PRS, using psychometry and text mining. The results showed that there was a difference between the means of grades in the empathy evaluation, in favor of NeuroMessenger. Although it is initial study, the results are encouraging, and more research on textual matching to gain empathy is needed.
... More specifically, and considering basic cognitive processes such as attention, a recent study has reported a bias towards the positive information generated by MS (Kashdan et al., 2014); that is, when 114 the idea of death enters our consciousness, a bias towards positive information occurs. This could be understood as a deviation of our attentional focus towards what is positive, thus preventing the entry of negative information. ...
En la presente Tesis se ha investigado el efecto de variables verbales y no verbales en la valoración de la personalidad desde la perspectiva de la formación de impresiones. En los dos primeros apartados se sitúa al lector en los aspectos más relevantes de los denominados “contexto verbal” y “contexto no verbal”, tanto en lo referido a los procesos cognitivos como al sustrato neuronal que soporta su correcto funcionamiento, entendiendo que, aún siendo una Tesis que se situaría dentro del ámbito de influencia de la Psicología Social, se requiere tener presente las estructuras cerebrales implicadas y que en último término estarían soportando los efectos encontrados en los sesgos valorativos. El tercer apartado se ha centrado en los procesos de formación de impresiones, teoría y recientes investigaciones, que derivarán de manera natural en los objetivos de investigación; es decir, en el análisis del efecto de la interacción entre la información verbal y no verbal en la valoración de la personalidad, teniendo en cuenta, además, las posibles implicaciones en diferentes tópicos y ámbitos de investigación, como la Teoría de la Gestión del Terror y los procesos judiciales, que serán tratados en los dos últimos apartados de la introducción, y desarrollados en mayor profundidad en los artículos correspondientes.
Con este objetivo, la primera fase del trabajo consistió en elaborar un paradigma que permitiera medir el efecto de la interacción entre la información verbal y no verbal sobre la valoración de la personalidad. Una vez preparado se puso a prueba para comprobar su sensibilidad en los dos primeros estudios de esta Tesis, donde se comprobó que el contexto verbal que rodea una expresión facial tiene efectos tanto en el posterior reconocimiento de la expresión emocional (experimento 1) como en la valoración de los rasgos de la personalidad, en concreto respecto a la sociabilidad (experimento 2).
Una vez comprobada la sensibilidad del paradigma se aplicó a una muestra amplia de sujetos compuesta por 301 estudiantes (experimento 3). Los resultados evidenciaron un efecto significativo de la interacción entre los aspectos verbales y no verbales en la valoración de los rasgos de personalidad: la coherencia positiva entre la información verbal (información positiva) y no verbal (expresión de alegría) presentadas por separado en la fase de codificación y valoración respectivamente, generó una impresión más positiva en los rasgos de estabilidad emocional, amabilidad y sociabilidad.
Los dos últimos trabajos (experimentos 4 y 5), indagaron sobre los efectos encontrados en el anterior experimento, pero en ámbitos como el de la Teoría de la Gestión del Terror y los procedimientos judiciales. En ambos estudios se evidenció un efecto importante del contexto verbal sobre la valoración de la personalidad en presencia de una expresión facial. Por un lado, se puso de manifiesto que la prominencia de mortalidad generaba un decremento en los valores de la personalidad percibida solo cuando venía asociada a un contexto verbal negativo (valoración más negativa de la estabilidad emocional y la responsabilidad); por otro lado, se evidenció que la información negativa que rodea el proceso judicial de un acusado daba lugar a una valoración más negativa de los rasgos referidos a la estabilidad emocional, responsabilidad y amabilidad, que en último término podría sesgar el procesamiento de la información vertida durante el juicio.
La presente Tesis ha puesto de manifiesto los siguiente puntos sobre los que se debería seguir profundizando: 1) el contexto verbal tiene un importante papel modulador en la valoración de la personalidad; 2) la congruencia entre la información verbal y no verbal, así como el momento de la codificación de la información, son dos variables a tener en cuenta en futuras investigaciones que indaguen sobre este tópico de investigación; 3) las implicaciones de estos resultados se centran en los sesgos valorativos encontrados, que podrían afectar en diferente grado a las interacciones sociales dentro de ámbitos tan sensibles como el judicial.
En el último apartado de esta Tesis se desarrollarán los aspectos más relevantes, que a modo de conclusiones e integración de los resultados obtenidos, permitirán una perspectiva más clara de las limitaciones y futuras líneas de investigación que se podrían emprender.
... More specifically, and considering basic cognitive processes such as attention, a recent study has reported a bias towards the positive information generated by MS (Kashdan et al., 2014); that is, when the idea of death enters our consciousness, a bias towards positive information occurs. This could be understood as a deviation of our attentional focus towards what is positive, thus preventing the entry of negative information. ...
Mortality salience, or awareness of the inevitability of one's own death, generates a state of anxiety that triggers a defense mechanism for the control of thinking that affects different human activities and psychological processes. This study aims to analyze the effect of mortality salience on the formation of impressions. The sample comprised 135 women who made inferences about a woman's personality from information about her life (type of life, LT: positive, negative), provided through five words, all positive or negative, that appeared surrounding a photograph, together with a sixth word that indicated whether she was " dead " or " alive " at the time (mortality manipulation, MM: dead, alive). The results pointed to a more negative assessment of life (Dead M-Alive M =-1.16, SE = .236, p < .001), emotional stability (Dead M-Alive M =-1.13, SE = .431, p = .010), and responsibility (Dead M-Alive M =-1.14, SE = .423, p = .008) only when the participants had access to negative information about the person assessed, and she was known to be dead. We discuss the results within the framework of Terror Management Theory, and analyze the different effects that the manipulation of mortality has on the formation of impressions depending on the type of information available.
The last two decades have witnessed a significant growth in the volume of academic work exploring the final statements of inmates executed in the United States of America. While this has done much to advance academic understanding of final statements, comparably little attention has been paid to the not-insignificant number of inmates who decline to speak prior to their execution. The article presents the results of a regression analysis of a 574-case data set covering all executions conducted in Texas between December 1982 and April 2022. Despite including a range of variables, analysis identified only a single significant result: the presence of victims' family and/or close friends. The significance of this finding for existing scholarship and practice is discussed, alongside possible directions for future research.
In people’s imagination, dying seems dreadful; however, these perceptions may not reflect reality. In two studies, we compared the affective experience of people facing imminent death with that of people imagining imminent death. Study 1 revealed that blog posts of near-death patients with cancer and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis were more positive and less negative than the simulated blog posts of nonpatients—and also that the patients’ blog posts became more positive as death neared. Study 2 revealed that the last words of death-row inmates were more positive and less negative than the simulated last words of noninmates—and also that these last words were less negative than poetry written by death-row inmates. Together, these results suggest that the experience of dying—even because of terminal illness or execution—may be more pleasant than one imagines.
The present study examined the possible moderating roles of personality on the link between the fear of happiness and the experience of happiness, with happiness defined as the frequency of positive and negative affect. Respondents completed measures of affect, fear of happiness, and the big-five personality inventory. Result revealed substantial moderating effects of personality, but the pattern differed across positive and negative affect. Whereas higher levels of agreeableness and neuroticism potentiated the effect of fear of happiness on positive affect, higher levels of extraversion, conscientiousness, and openness to experience weakened the effect. On the other hand, except for higher levels of extraversion that also undermined the influence of fear of happiness on negative affect, fear of happiness and negative affect were positively related at all levels of the personality dimensions. These findings highlight the need to incorporate personality into the study and theoretical articulations of the operations of the fear of happiness.
The present research examined whether people imitate the language style of others (i.e., the use of function words) as a form of liking when mortality concerns are salient. In Study 1, participants answered questions about death or public speaking and then engaged in an instant messaging conversation with a confederate. In Study 2, participant pairs verbally discussed a news article about increasing homicide rates or the rise in academic pressure. Next, everyone completed measures of self-esteem, life satisfaction, and relationship need satisfaction. The results revealed that, in comparison to the control conditions, participants exhibited greater language style matching (LSM) following reminders of death (Studies 1 & 2). Further, mediational analyses showed that higher LSM after mortality salience was associated with better psychological and social well-being (Study 2). Although the threat of death has been shown to make people more hostile and disparaging toward dissimilar others, the present work suggests that individuals, even strangers, may feel closer through language coordination following thoughts of mortality.
Reminders of death tend to produce strong cognitive and behavioral responses, but little or no emotional response. In three experiments, mortality salience produced an automatic coping response that involved tuning to positive emotional information. Subjects showed increased accessibility of positive emotional information (Experiments 1 and 3) and gave more weight to positive emotion in their judgments of word similarity (Experiment 2) after contemplating death than after thinking about dental pain. This automatic coping response was found both after a delay (Experiments 1 and 2) and directly after the mortality-salience manipulation (Experiment 3), which suggests that the coping process begins immediately. Tuning to positive emotional information in response to mortality salience was unconscious and counterintuitive (Experiment 3). These findings shed light on the coping process that ensues immediately following mortality salience and help to explain why a delay is often necessary to produce effects in line with terror management theory.
Happiness is generally considered a source of good outcomes. Research has highlighted the ways in which happiness facilitates the pursuit of important goals, contributes to vital social bonds, broadens people's scope of attention, and increases well-being and psychological health. However, is happiness always a good thing? This review suggests that the pursuit and experience of happiness might sometimes lead to negative outcomes. We focus on four questions regarding this purported "dark side" of happiness. First, is there a wrong degree of happiness? Second, is there a wrong time for happiness? Third, are there wrong ways to pursue happiness? Fourth, are there wrong types of happiness? Cumulatively, these lines of research suggest that although happiness is often highly beneficial, it may not be beneficial at every level, in every context, for every reason, and in every variety.
© The Author(s) 2011.
Text analysis has been receiving increasing attention within the social sciences. This surge of interest is reflected in several recent books (Neuendorf, 2002; Popping, 2000; Smith, 1992; Weber, 1990; West, 2001), chapters (e.g., Smith, 2000), and review articles (e.g., Lee & Peterson, 1997; Pennebaker, Mehl, & Niederhoffer, 2003) on the topic. This chapter seeks to demonstrate that quantitative text analysis is a powerful, efficient, and easy-to-use scientific method with a wide spectrum of applications in psychology. It is organized into four major sections. At the beginning, an example of text analysis from social psychology is presented. This is followed by a brief historical overview of text analysis and an introduction to the conceptual foundation of text analysis. The third section reviews nine influential text analysis approaches in psychology. The final part discusses potentials and problems of quantitative text analysis. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The hypothesis that mortality salience (MS) motivates aggression against worldview-threatening others was tested in 4 studies. In Study 1, the experimenters induced participants to write about either their own death or a control topic, presented them with a target who either disparaged their political views or did not, and gave them the opportunity to choose the amount of hot sauce the target would have to consume. As predicted, MS participants allocated a particularly large amount of hot sauce to the worldview-threatening target. In Studies 2 and 3, the authors found that following MS induction, the opportunity to express a negative attitude toward the critical target eliminated aggression and the opportunity to aggress against the target eliminated derogation. This suggests that derogation and aggression are two alternative modes of responding to MS that serve the same psychological function. Finally, Study 4 showed that MS did not encourage aggression against a person who allocated unpleasant juice to the participant, supporting the specificity of MS-induced aggression to worldview-threatening others. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
American culture is filled with cultural products. Yet few studies have investigated how changes in cultural products correspond to changes in psychological traits and emotions. The current research fills this gap by testing the hypothesis that one cultural product—word use in popular song lyrics—changes over time in harmony with cultural changes in individualistic traits. Linguistic analyses of the most popular songs from 1980–2007 demonstrated changes in word use that mirror psychological change. Over time, use of words related to self-focus and antisocial behavior increased, whereas words related to other-focus, social interactions, and positive emotion decreased. These findings offer novel evidence regarding the need to investigate how changes in the tangible artifacts of the sociocultural environment can provide a window into understanding cultural changes in psychological processes.
We examined the effects of sensorimotor experience in two visual word recognition tasks. Body-object interaction (BOI) ratings were collected for a large set of words. These ratings assess the perceptions of the ease with which a human body can physically interact with a word's referent. A set of high BOI words (e.g., mask) and a set of low BOI words (e.g., ship) were created, matched on imageability and concreteness. Facilitatory BOI effects were observed in lexical decision and phonological lexical decision tasks: responses were faster for high BOI words than for low BOI words. We discuss how our findings may be accounted for by (a) semantic feedback within the visual word recognition system, and (b) an embodied view of cognition (e.g., Barsalou's perceptual symbol systems theory), which proposes that semantic knowledge is grounded in sensorimotor interactions with the environment.
Research derived from terror management theory (TMT) has shown that people's efforts to manage the awareness of death often have deleterious consequences for the individual and society. The present article takes a closer look at the conceptual foundations of TMT and considers some of the more beneficial trajectories of the terror management process. The awareness of mortality can motivate people to enhance their physical health and prioritize growth-oriented goals; live up to positive standards and beliefs; build supportive relationships and encourage the development of peaceful, charitable communities; and foster open-minded and growth-oriented behaviors. The article also tentatively explores the potential enriching impact of direct encounters with death. Overall, the present analysis suggests that although death awareness can, at times, generate negative outcomes, it can also function to move people along more positive trajectories and contribute to the good life.
Terror management theory posits that people tend to respond defensively to reminders of death, including worldview defense, self-esteem striving, and suppression of death thoughts. Seven experiments examined whether trait mindfulness-a disposition characterized by receptive attention to present experience-reduced defensive responses to mortality salience (MS). Under MS, less mindful individuals showed higher worldview defense (Studies 1-3) and self-esteem striving (Study 5), yet more mindful individuals did not defend a constellation of values theoretically associated with mindfulness (Study 4). To explain these findings through proximal defense processes, Study 6 showed that more mindful individuals wrote about their death for a longer period of time, which partially mediated the inverse association between trait mindfulness and worldview defense. Study 7 demonstrated that trait mindfulness predicted less suppression of death thoughts immediately following MS. The discussion highlights the relevance of mindfulness to theories that emphasize the nature of conscious processing in understanding responses to threat.
Terror management research has shown that reminding Ss of their mortality leads to intolerance. The present research assessed whether mortality salience would lead to increased intolerance when the value of tolerance is highly accessible. In Study 1, given that liberals value tolerance more than conservatives, it was hypothesized that with mortality salience, dislike of dissimilar others would increase among conservatives but decrease among liberals. Liberal and conservative Ss were induced to think about their own mortality or a neutral topic and then were asked to evaluate 2 target persons, 1 liberal, the other conservative. Ss' evaluations of the targets supported these hypotheses. In Study 2, the value of tolerance was primed for half the Ss and, under mortality-salient or control conditions, Ss evaluated a target person who criticized the United States. Mortality salience did not lead to negative reactions to the critic when the value of tolerance was highly accessible.
Socioemotional selectivity theory claims that the perception of time plays a fundamental role in the selection and pursuit of social goals. According to the theory, social motives fall into 1 of 2 general categories--those related to the acquisition of knowledge and those related to the regulation of emotion. When time is perceived as open-ended, knowledge-related goals are prioritized. In contrast, when time is perceived as limited, emotional goals assume primacy. The inextricable association between time left in life and chronological age ensures age-related differences in social goals. Nonetheless, the authors show that the perception of time is malleable, and social goals change in both younger and older people when time constraints are imposed. The authors argue that time perception is integral to human motivation and suggest potential implications for multiple subdisciplines and research interests in social, developmental, cultural, cognitive, and clinical psychology.
Distinct defensive processes are activated by conscious and nonconscious but accessible thoughts of death. Proximal defenses, which entail suppressing death-related thoughts or pushing the problem of death into the distant future by denying one's vulnerability, are rational, threat-focused, and activated when thoughts of death are in current focal attention. Distal terror management defenses, which entail maintaining self-esteem and faith in one's cultural worldview, function to control the potential for anxiety that results from knowing that death is inevitable. These defenses are experiential, are not related to the problem of death in any semantic or logical way, and are increasingly activated as the accessibility of death-related thoughts increases, up to the point at which such thoughts enter consciousness and proximal threat-focused defenses are initiated. Experimental evidence for this analysis is presented.
The words people use in their daily lives can reveal important aspects of their social and psychological worlds. With advances in computer technology, text analysis allows researchers to reliably and quickly assess features of what people say as well as subtleties in their linguistic styles. Following a brief review of several text analysis programs, we summarize some of the evidence that links natural word use to personality, social and situational fluctuations, and psychological interventions. Of particular interest are findings that point to the psychological value of studying particles-parts of speech that include pronouns, articles, prepositions, conjunctives, and auxiliary verbs. Particles, which serve as the glue that holds nouns and regular verbs together, can serve as markers of emotional state, social identity, and cognitive styles.
Two studies examined age differences in recall and recognition memory for positive, negative, and neutral stimuli. In Study 1, younger, middle-aged, and older adults were shown images on a computer screen and, after a distraction task, were asked first to recall as many as they could and then to identify previously shown images from a set of old and new ones. The relative number of negative images compared with positive and neutral images recalled decreased with each successively older age group. Recognition memory showed a similar decrease with age in the relative memory advantage for negative pictures. In Study 2, the largest age differences in recall and recognition accuracy were also for the negative images. Findings are consistent with socioemotional selectivity theory, which posits greater investment in emotion regulation with age.
Two projects explored the links between language use and aging. In the first project, written or spoken text samples from disclosure studies from over 3,000 research participants from 45 different studies representing 21 laboratories in 3 countries were analyzed to determine how people change in their use of 14 text dimensions as a function of age. A separate project analyzed the collected works of 10 well-known novelists, playwrights, and poets who lived over the last 500 years. Both projects found that with increasing age, individuals use more positive and fewer negative affect words, use fewer self-references, use more future-tense and fewer past-tense verbs, and demonstrate a general pattern of increasing cognitive complexity. Implications for using language as a marker of personality among current and historical texts are discussed.
Research supporting terror management theory has shown that participants facing their death (via mortality salience) exhibit more greed than do control participants. The present research attempts to distinguish mortality salience from other forms of mortality awareness. Specifically, the authors look to reports of near-death experiences and posttraumatic growth which reveal that many people who nearly die come to view seeking wealth and possession as empty and meaningless. Guided by these reports, a manipulation called death reflection was generated. In Study 1, highly extrinsic participants who experienced death reflection exhibited intrinsic behavior. In Study 2, the manipulation was validated, and in Study 3, death reflection and mortality salience manipulations were compared. Results showed that mortality salience led highly extrinsic participants to manifest greed, whereas death reflection again generated intrinsic, unselfish behavior. The construct of value orientation is discussed along with the contrast between death reflection manipulation and mortality salience.
Terror management theory (TMT; J. Greenberg, T. Pyszczynski, & S. Solomon, 1986) posits that people are motivated to pursue positive self-evaluations because self-esteem provides a buffer against the omnipresent potential for anxiety engendered by the uniquely human awareness of mortality. Empirical evidence relevant to the theory is reviewed showing that high levels of self-esteem reduce anxiety and anxiety-related defensive behavior, reminders of one's mortality increase self-esteem striving and defense of self-esteem against threats in a variety of domains, high levels of self-esteem eliminate the effect of reminders of mortality on both self-esteem striving and the accessibility of death-related thoughts, and convincing people of the existence of an afterlife eliminates the effect of mortality salience on self-esteem striving. TMT is compared with other explanations for why people need self-esteem, and a critique of the most prominent of these, sociometer theory, is provided.
The authors propose that volitional action is supported by intuitive affect regulation, defined as flexible, efficient, and nonrepressive control of own affective states. Intuitive affect regulation should be most apparent among action-oriented individuals under demanding conditions. Consistent with this, a demanding context led action-oriented individuals to down-regulate negative affect in self-reports (Study 1), in an affective Simon task (Study 2), and in a face discrimination task (Study 3). In line with the idea that intuitive affect regulation is guided by top-down self-regulation processes, intuitive affect regulation in a face discrimination task was mediated by increases in self-accessibility (Study 3). No parallel effects emerged among action-oriented participants in a nondemanding context or among state-oriented participants.
Why do people dislike art that they find meaningless? According to terror management theory, maintaining a basic meaningful view of reality is a key prerequisite for managing concerns about mortality. Therefore, mortality salience should decrease liking for apparently meaningless art, particularly among those predisposed to unambiguous knowledge. Accordingly, mortality salience diminished affection for modern art in Study 1, and this effect was shown in Study 2 to be specific to individuals with a high personal need for structure (PNS). In Studies 3 and 4, mortality salient high-PNS participants disliked modern art unless it was imbued with meaning, either by means of a title or a personal frame of reference induction. Discussion focused on the roles of meaninglessness, PNS, and art in terror management.
Research findings within posttraumatic growth (PTG) and terror management theory (TMT) currently appear contradictory. Following confrontations with mortality, PTG research demonstrates intrinsic goal shifts, whereas TMT suggests extrinsic shifts. The current studies examine factors contributing to these inconsistent results. Study 1 demonstrates that perceived death threat is associated with PTG effects. Study 2 illuminates the importance of duration of death processing. Study 3 demonstrates that existing goal values and duration and type of processing all interact in determining ultimate goal structure, with a match between level of goals and processing producing the most psychologically advantageous outcomes. Although previous research suggests that short-term confrontations with death may lead to defensiveness, the current studies suggest that encountering death over a longer period or in a manner consistent with goal structure may lead individuals to transcend defensiveness and maintain intrinsic goals or become more intrinsically oriented.
SAS PROC MIXED is a flexible program suitable for fitting multilevel models, hierarchical linear models, and individual growth models. Its position as an integrated program within the SAS statistical package makes it an ideal choice for empirical researchers and applied statisticians seeking to do data reduction, management, and analysis within a single statistical package. Because the program was developed from the perspective of a "mixed" statistical model with both random and fixed effects, its syntax and programming logic may appear unfamiliar to users in education and the social and behavioral sciences who tend to express these models as multilevel or hierarchical models. The purpose of this paper is to help users familiar with fitting multilevel models using other statistical packages (e.g., HLM, MLwiN, MIXREG) add SAS PROC MIXED to their array of analytic options. The paper is written as a step-by-step tutorial that shows how to fit the two most common multilevel models: (a) school effects models, designed for data on individuals nested within naturally occurring hierarchies (e.g., students within classes); and (b) individual growth models, designed for exploring longitudinal data (on individuals) over time. The conclusion discusses how these ideas can be extended straighforwardly to the case of three level models. An appendix presents general strategies for working with multilevel data in SAS and for creating data sets at several levels.
SAS PROC MIXED is a flexible program suitable for fitting multilevel models, hierarchical linear models, and individual growth models. Its position as an integrated program within the SAS statistical package makes it an ideal choice for empirical researchers and applied statisticians seeking to do data reduction, management, and analysis within a single statistical package. Because the program was developed from the perspective of a "mixed" statistical model with both random and fixed effects, its syntax and programming logic may appear unfamiliar to users in education and the social and behavioral sciences who tend to express these models as multilevel or hierarchical models. The purpose of this paper is to help users familiar with fitting multilevel models using other statistical packages (e.g., HLM, MLwiN, MIXREG) add SAS PROC MIXED to their array of analytic options. The paper is written as a step-by-step tutorial that shows how to fit the two most common multilevel models: (a) school effects models, designed for data on individuals nested within naturally occurring hierarchies (e.g., students within classes); and (b) individual growth models, designed for exploring longitudinal data (on individuals) over time. The conclusion discusses how these ideas can be extended straighforwardly to the case of three level models. An appendix presents general strategies for working with multilevel data in SAS and for creating data sets at several levels.
The history of empirical psychology is one of making measurable what most laypeople think cannot be measured--emotions, cognitions, motivations, personality traits, and so forth. As in all other empirical and natural sciences, the progress of psychology is closely and inextricably linked to the development of new and more refined methods for measuring psychological concepts. A multimethod approach offers insights into scientific phenomena and can contribute to confirming psychological theories in a way a single-method approach cannot. There are at least two reasons why psychology research and applied work make a multimethod research necessary: the multicomponential structure of psychological phenomena and the validity of a research program. This introduction discusses these two reasons and other related issues. It ends with an overview of the handbook and a brief discussion of its aims. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
A meta-analysis was conducted on empirical trials investigating the mortality salience (MS) hypothesis of terror management theory (TMT). TMT postulates that investment in cultural worldviews and self-esteem serves to buffer the potential for death anxiety; the MS hypothesis states that, as a consequence, accessibility of death-related thought (MS) should instigate increased worldview and self-esteem defense and striving. Overall, 164 articles with 277 experiments were included. MS yielded moderate effects (r = .35) on a range of worldview- and self-esteem-related dependent variables (DVs), with effects increased for experiments using (a) American participants, (b) college students, (c) a longer delay between MS and the DV, and (d) people-related attitudes as the DV. Gender and self-esteem may moderate MS effects differently than previously thought. Results are compared to other reviews and examined with regard to alternative explanations of TMT. Finally, suggestions for future research are offered.
That the scarcity of objects enhances their value is a widely known principle in the behavioral sciences. In addition, research has demonstrated that attaching high value to an object produces biased perceptions of its scarcity. Three studies applied this bidirectional link between scarcity and value to the meaning of death, testing the prediction that death represents the scarcity of life. In Study 1, reminders of death led to enhanced evaluations of life. In Studies 2 and 3, the monetary (Study 2) and psychological (Study 3) value of life were manipulated. In both studies, when human life was highly valuable, the concept of death was more accessible, as predicted from the association between value and scarcity. Previous theoretical treatments of the meaning of death have shared the notion that death is essentially a threat requiring psychological defenses. The present results suggest that, from an informational perspective, death represents the scarcity of life.
Five studies examined how self-focused attention affects the impact of negative moods on autobiographical memory. It was proposed that self-focused attention to moods may increase the likelihood of both mood-congruent recall and mood-incongruent recall and that the type of recall effect that occurs will depend on the manner in which people focus on their moods. In these studies, participants were led to experience negative or neutral moods, exposed to a manipulation designed to affect some aspect of their attention to their moods, and then asked to report memories. This research revealed that when people adopt a reflective orientation to their moods, they are more likely to engage in mood-incongruent recall; in contrast, when they adopt a ruminative orientation to their moods, they are more likely to engage in mood-congruent recall. Thus, the way in which people focus on their moods moderates the relation between mood and memory.
The relation between social anxiety and hedonic activity remains poorly understood. From a self-regulatory perspective, we hypothesized that socially anxious individuals experience diminished positive experiences and events on days when they are unable to manage socially anxious feelings adequately. In this 21-day experience-sampling study, we constructed daily measures of social anxiety and emotion regulation. Greater dispositional social anxiety was associated with less positive affect and fewer positive events in everyday life. Among individuals defined as socially anxious from their scores on a global self-report measure of social anxiety, the number of positive events was lowest on days when they both were more socially anxious and tended to suppress emotions and highest on days when they were less socially anxious and more accepting of emotional experiences. Irrespective of dispositional social anxiety, participants reported the most intense positive emotions on the days when they were both least socially anxious and most accepting of emotional experiences. Possible clinical implications are discussed.
Introductory lectures on psychoanalysis. London: Liveright [Original work
- S Freud
Freud, S. (1989). Introductory lectures on psychoanalysis. London: Liveright [Original
work published in 1915].